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To Shape French Rolls
Have same board as used for French loaf standing by. Place on it a duck cloth considerably longer than board, and flute in sections two inches apart and two inches high. Dredge a very little cornmeal flour over twelve of the balls only, lay rolling-pin crosswise over one of the balls right in centre, and with both hands press down to about three-quarters the height of roll. Carefully roll pin around two or three times, being careful to leave a quarter of bottom intact. Lay roll very carefully in a section of the cloth, split side down, and proceed with eleven more in the same manner, taking care to keep them about one inch apart from one another in the sections. TO SHAPE FLUTTES (PISTOLETS) Take one of the remaining twelve balls, with the hands roll and press it out to four and a half inches long and round pointed at both ends, and arrange it in a section of the fluted cloth. Finish the other remaining eleven in same way, place in sections, also keeping them an inch apart from one another. Cover with a dry cloth or buttered paper and place them in a temperature of 80 degrees to rise for forty-five minutes.
This is the shaping stage of a French bread dough, split between two roll forms; the dough, its bulk fermentation and the bake are covered in the neighbouring entries. What follows is what the instructions assume you already own or already know.
- Duck cloth is a coucheDuck cloth serves as a couche -- Duck is a heavy plain-weave cotton canvas, used here for the same purpose as the linen couche sold for bread today, though the fibre differs. Pleating it "in sections two inches apart and two inches high" makes standing walls of cloth that hold each roll's sides up while it proves; a floured tea towel over a board does the same job less tidily.
- Twenty-four ballsThe instructions divide the batch into twelve split rolls and twelve fluttes, so the preceding dough was scaled and rounded into two dozen pieces. If you are shaping a smaller batch, keep the proportions of the cloth pleats rather than the counts.
- "Cornmeal flour"Read this as fine cornmeal or corn flour used as a dusting agent, not as an ingredient. It keeps the rolling-pin crease from sealing shut, which is the whole point of dusting only the twelve destined for splitting.
- The hinge: leave the base intactPressing the pin down to three-quarters the height and rolling it two or three times creases the ball almost through while leaving a quarter of the bottom joined. Cut or press all the way through and the roll opens into two pieces in the oven instead of springing apart along a hinge.
- Split side downThe creased roll proves face down in the cloth. This page does not say how it reaches the oven; presumably it is turned over so that the crease opens under oven spring rather than setting closed.
- PistoletsThe recipe itself glosses "flutte" as "pistolet" and applies both to the small pointed roll; elsewhere pistolet more usually names a split-topped roll, so the terminology is not consistent. At four and a half inches these are dinner-roll size, not baguettes.
- 80 degrees means FahrenheitThat is about 27C, a warm room or a turned-off oven with the light on. Forty-five minutes at that temperature is a full final proof for rolls of this size; in a cool kitchen it will take considerably longer, so judge by the dough, which should be visibly swollen and slow to spring back when pressed.
- Buttered paperThe cover exists only to stop a skin forming. Plastic wrap or an inverted tub does the same and does not stick.
Books of this period taught bread shaping as a sequence of separate lessons — mixing, the loaf, the rolls — on the assumption that a competent cook would read the whole chapter before touching dough, which is why this page begins mid-process with "the same board as used for French loaf." The fluted cloth it calls for is the professional baker's couche, and its appearance in a domestic manual reflects the era's interest in reproducing bakery work at home. The instruction to prove at a measured 80 degrees is a small sign of the times, when cookery writers had begun to give numbers where an earlier generation would have written "in a warm place."