Lunch Rolls
1 yeast cake 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1¼ cupfuls milk 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 4 cupfuls flour 1 egg 1 teaspoonful salt Scald and cool the milk, then add yeast and sugar. Now add Crisco and 2 cupfuls flour. Beat thoroughly, then add egg well beaten, remainder of flour and salt. Mix and turn out on floured board and knead lightly and thoroughly, using as little flour as possible. Place in greased bowl, cover and set aside in warm place to rise two hours. When light, form into small rounds, place one inch apart on greased pan. Allow to rise half an hour. Brush over with Crisco and bake in hot oven fifteen minutes. Sufficient for twenty rolls. 1 egg 1 cupful sugar 1 cupful sour cream
A plain enriched dinner roll from Procter & Gamble's promotional booklet, straightforward once two typesetting problems are sorted out.
- The milk quantity is wrong as printedA quarter cup of milk cannot hydrate four cups of flour. The plural 'cupfuls' suggests a dropped figure, and something in the region of 1 1/4 cupfuls gives a soft, kneadable dough. Add the liquid gradually and judge by feel rather than trusting the printed figure.
- The last line belongs to another recipe"1 egg, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful sour cream" is a stray ingredient list from a neighbouring recipe. Ignore it entirely.
- Yeast cakeOne cake of compressed fresh yeast of the period is roughly 0.6 oz, equivalent to about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. If using active dry, let it stand in the warm milk a few minutes before proceeding.
- Scald and coolScalding was standard practice when milk was raw; it was held to deal with something in raw milk that weakens gluten. With pasteurised milk most bakers find it unnecessary; simply warm it to about 110F. If you do scald, cool it well down before the yeast goes in, as hot liquid will kill the yeast.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits small rolls; check for a hollow sound and a deep gold top.
- Crisco and the brushingCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still behaving as it did here, though reformulated in the 2000s to cut trans fat. Any solid shortening or softened butter substitutes in the dough. Brushing the tops with melted shortening before baking gives a soft crust rather than a crisp one; melted butter does the same and tastes better.
- Rising timesTwo hours for the first rise and thirty minutes for the second assume a cool kitchen. In a modern room at 70F the first rise may be done in an hour and a quarter. Judge by doubling in bulk, not by the clock.
- Spacing and yieldOne inch apart gives rolls that touch as they proof and pull apart after baking. Twenty rolls is right for four cups of flour, working out to about 1 1/2 oz of dough each.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's booklet for a product that had reached the market in 1911: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid that neither smelled nor spoiled like lard. The company's problem was that no cook had a use for it, so the book supplied several hundred, quietly substituting Crisco wherever butter, lard or suet would have stood. A yeast roll needs very little fat, and the two tablespoonfuls here do nothing that butter would not do better; their presence is advertising as much as cookery. The strategy worked, and shortening's neutrality and long keeping made it a fixture of American baking for most of the following century, well before the nutritional case against hydrogenated fats caught up with it.