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Butter Rolls for Breakfast
Butter rolls are made by dissolving two tablespoonfuls of butter in one pint of scalded milk and adding, when cooled, one scant teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of sugar, one-half of a yeast cake dissolved in a little warm water, and enough flour to make a soft dough. Knead lightly for five minutes, then set aside to rise. When very light make into small rolls and let rise in the pans before baking.
A plain overnight-style milk roll with no oven temperature, no flour quantity and no baking time given — all three have to be supplied. Nothing else about it is difficult.
- The hinge: milk temperatureScalding the milk is the one step to respect, but the yeast goes in only after the milk has cooled to lukewarm (about 105–110F). Added to hot milk, the yeast dies and the dough will never rise.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so half a cake is roughly 1 to 1¼ teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or one 2¼-teaspoon packet if you want a faster rise. Fresh cake yeast is sold today in 2-oz blocks — use about a sixth of a block.
- Flour"Enough flour to make a soft dough" works out to roughly 5 to 5½ cups of all-purpose flour for one pint of milk. Add the last cup gradually; the dough should stay tacky rather than stiff.
- KneadingFive minutes is short by modern standards. Eight to ten minutes by hand gives a better crumb without making the rolls tough.
- Rising times"Set aside to rise" until "very light" means roughly 1½ to 2 hours at normal room temperature, or until doubled. Shaped rolls need a further 45 minutes to an hour in the pans.
- OvenBake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and a roll sounds hollow when tapped underneath. Brush with melted butter as they come out if you want the soft top the name implies.
- YieldOne pint of milk gives about 20 to 24 small rolls in two 9-inch pans, or 18 slightly larger ones.
Butter rolls belong to the American breakfast-bread tradition that assumed a household baking every day or two: enriched with a little fat, sugar and milk, but nothing like the egg-and-butter doughs reserved for company. Turn-of-the-century cookbooks commonly placed such rolls in the breakfast chapter because hot bread at the morning meal was the expected mark of a well-run kitchen, and a soft dough set to rise the evening before or very early could be shaped and baked while the rest of the meal came together. The vague directions here are typical of the genre: measurements for the liquids and the seasoning, which a cook could not guess, and none at all for flour, kneading or oven heat, which she was assumed to judge by hand and by the feel of the range. Compressed yeast cakes, sold increasingly from the 1870s and 1880s onward, are what made a same-morning rise practical; before them such doughs generally depended on homemade or salt-rising ferments.