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Quick Dinner Rolls
1 compressed yeast cake 3/4 cup scalded milk 1/4 cup tepid water 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Karo, Red Label 1/2 teaspoon salt From 3 to 4 cups bread flour Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add to the milk, scalded, cooled and combined with the Karo, salt and Mazola. Sift in three cups flour, beating hard and add enough more to make it the right consistency to knead. Let rise till double in size, cut down, roll to one-fourth-inch thickness, brush sparingly with Mazola, shape with a large round biscuit cutter, crease with the back of a knife, fold into pocket shape, place in a pan oiled with Mazola, let rise until double again and bake fifteen to twenty minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F.
A Parker House–style roll built around the two products this book exists to sell. It is a sound, mildly sweet enriched dough; the only real translation work is in the yeast, the branded ingredients, and the oven.
- The yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of this period was roughly 0.6 oz of fresh cake yeast. One packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast stands in for it. Dissolve dry yeast in the 1/4 cup water at about 105F rather than merely "tepid."
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral oil works, and melted butter gives a better flavour at the same volume if you are not bound to the brand.
- Karo, Red LabelKaro sold light (Blue Label) and darker, stronger-tasting (Red Label) syrups in this era. Dark corn syrup is the closest match; light corn syrup or honey will work with a paler crumb. Two tablespoons is there to feed the yeast and brown the crust, not to sweeten.
- Scalding the milkScalding was standard when milk was raw. It is usually explained as neutralising something in raw milk that slackens a dough, and it also killed off bacteria. With pasteurised milk it serves mainly to warm the liquid. Whichever you do, cool it to lukewarm before it meets the yeast.
- Flour quantityThree to four cups is a wide range because flour absorbency varied. Start at three, add by quarter-cups, and stop when the dough is soft and slightly tacky rather than stiff — an underfloured dough gives the lighter roll.
- The ovenThe recipe calls a 375F oven "hot," which is at the low end for rolls of this size. At 375F, fifteen to twenty minutes is right; if you push to 400F, check at twelve.
- ShapingRoll thin, oil lightly, cut 2 1/2 to 3 inch rounds, press the crease off-centre with the knife back and fold the larger half over. The oil is what keeps the fold from sealing shut, which is how the roll opens cleanly at the table.
- YieldNot stated. Expect eighteen to twenty-four rolls from this dough, depending on cutter size; scraps can be re-rolled once.
Booklets of this kind were produced by manufacturers rather than cooks: recipes that work perfectly well but in which the branded ingredient appears in every line, sometimes, as here, three times in a single method. Mazola corn oil and Karo corn syrup were both products of the American corn-refining industry, promoted heavily to home cooks in the early twentieth century as modern substitutes for butter, lard and sugar. The roll itself is the folded pocket shape generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston and by this date a standard of American dinner tables; what the booklet contributes is the substitution of oil for the butter such rolls were traditionally brushed with, and corn syrup for the pinch of sugar. The word "quick" is relative — there are still two full risings — and is often said to reflect a period when yeast doughs were more commonly set overnight.