Home › Miscellaneous › Sandwich Rolls
Sandwich Rolls
Take four cupfuls of light bread dough, spread it on the breadboard and roll thin. Spread this sheet with one cupful of butter, fold it up and roll out again; fold as before and let it stand a few minutes in a warm place. Now roll and fold twice more. Let stand a short time, roll out and cut into biscuits, place in pans, not touching, brush over the tops with a little lard and hot water. Let rise one hour and bake. These are very light and will pull apart in flakes. Any filling may be used.
This is a laminated yeast roll — bread dough given the butter turns of a rough puff pastry — and the original assumes you already know how to handle risen dough and judge an oven by hand. Two things need translating: the temperature and the temperature.
- The hinge: keep the butter coolThe recipe says to rest the folded dough "in a warm place," which was sound when kitchens were cold and butter was firm. In a modern room the butter melts into the dough and you lose the flakes; rest the folds in the refrigerator 15-20 minutes instead, and work quickly on a cool surface.
- "Light bread dough"Ordinary risen white yeast dough, taken at the point where it has doubled. Four cupfuls is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of dough — about one standard loaf's worth.
- A cupful of butter8 oz, two sticks. That is a very high ratio to the dough and is what produces the pull-apart layers. Have it pliable but not soft — pound it flat between parchment rather than melting it.
- "Cut into biscuits"Here this means rounds cut with a biscuit cutter, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches, not American baking-powder biscuits. Cut straight down without twisting or the laminated edges seal and the roll rises unevenly.
- Lard and hot water washThe recipe does not say why; most likely to keep the tops soft and pale through the long final rise. Melted butter, or melted butter thinned with a little warm water, would do much the same thing.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Rolls of this kind want a fairly hot oven, 400-425F, for 15-20 minutes — hot enough to set the layers before the butter runs out of them.
- The final riseOne hour suits a cool kitchen. In a 70F room check at 40-45 minutes; the rolls should look puffed and feel slack, not doubled and fragile.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 rolls from the full quantity, depending on cutter size. They stale fast, as all high-butter yeast rolls do, and are best the day they are baked.
Sandwich books proliferated in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the sandwich moved from a picnic makeshift to the centerpiece of ladies' luncheons, card parties and church suppers — occasions that wanted something daintier than two slices cut off a loaf. Hence a "Miscellaneous" chapter concerned with the bread itself: rolls, rusks and shaped breads built to be split and filled. The technique here, folding butter into risen bread dough over repeated turns, is a rough lamination of the kind long found in European butter breads. The instruction to place the rounds "not touching" keeps them separate rather than letting them steam each other soft as pan rolls baked shoulder to shoulder do.