Home › Bread › Boston Finger Rolls
Boston Finger Rolls
Scald a pint of sweet milk. When cool, add a tablespoonful of lard, one teaspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of sugar. Stir in enough flour to make a batter, as for muffins. Add half cup of yeast (or half cake of compressed yeast). In the morning when it is raised, stir in more flour and mold it stiff as for bread. Leave this to rise again. When very light, roll out this dough to a half-inch thickness. Cut this with a finger roll cutter and rub melted butter over them. Put them in a baking pan, leaving a space between each cake, and let them rise again.
This is a two-stage overnight sponge bread, written for a cook who already knew how to bake rolls — the original never says to put them in the oven. A few gaps need filling before you start.
- The missing ovenNo temperature or time is given because none was expected. Once the shaped rolls have doubled, bake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until they are golden and sound hollow. They are enriched but lean enough to brown quickly.
- Yeast conversion"Half a cup of yeast" means liquid barm or a home-kept yeast starter, not a modern commercial product. If the cake is read as the modern 0.6 oz size, half of one is about 0.3 oz, or roughly 1 teaspoon of active dry and a scant 3/4 teaspoon of instant — though compressed-yeast cakes varied in size by maker and period. Either way it is a small dose, suited to a long overnight rise in a cool kitchen.
- Flour is unstatedThe quantities are given by feel. A pint of milk, plus whatever liquid the yeast brings, will take somewhere in the region of 5 to 6 cups of flour in total, part of it in the batter sponge and the rest when you stiffen the dough in the morning. Stop when the dough is smooth and only slightly tacky.
- Scalding the milkScalding was held to deactivate components of raw milk — usually described as whey proteins — that weaken gluten. With modern pasteurised milk it is generally treated as unnecessary, though heating and cooling to lukewarm does no harm and speeds the sponge along.
- LardOne tablespoon of lard gives a tender crumb and a soft crust; butter or shortening substitutes directly at the same volume. This is a very modestly enriched dough — closer to a soft dinner roll than a brioche.
- The finger roll cutterFew kitchens have one. Cut the half-inch sheet into strips about 1 inch wide and 3 to 4 inches long, or roll each piece briefly under your palm into a blunt finger shape.
- Why the melted butterButtering before the final rise keeps a skin from forming as the shaped rolls prove, and may also have been meant to keep the sides soft where they expand towards one another. Leave the space between them that the recipe calls for.
- Timing and yieldMix the sponge in the evening; it wants 8 to 10 hours at cool room temperature. The second rise takes 1 to 1 1/2 hours, the shaped rise 30 to 45 minutes. Expect about 18 to 24 rolls.
Finger rolls — long, narrow, soft-crusted rolls served warm at supper or with tea — were a fixture of late nineteenth-century American bread chapters, and the "Boston" label attached itself to a good many baked goods of the period in what is often taken to be a mark of respectable New England housekeeping rather than any documented city origin. What dates the recipe most precisely is the yeast: the parenthetical "or half cake of compressed yeast" shows a cook being offered a choice between the homemade liquid yeast she had always kept and the compressed cakes that spread through American kitchens in the 1870s and after. The overnight sponge belongs to the same world, when a batter was set going at bedtime because the kitchen was cold and the yeast slow, and the morning's work began with a bowl that had already done half the job.