Finger Rolls
One quart flour, one ounce lard, one-half pint milk, onehalf cake of compressed yeast (or one teacupful of homemade yeast), one-half tablespoonful sugar, one-half teaspoonful of salt. In the evening put the flour in a bowl; put the salt and lard in the milk and warm until the lard is melted. When the milk is lukewarm, add the yeast; mix well and pour into the center of the flour. Do not stir it. Cover and leave it where it is cool. In the morning work it thoroughly and let it rise; two hours before you wish to serve them, roll it out half an inch thick; cut with a tin cutter three inches long and one across. With a feather coat the top with melted butter. Lay them apart in buttered pans, and when light, bake.
An overnight dough that asks almost nothing of the cook the first evening and rewards patience the next morning. Two measurements and one omission need translating before you start.
- The measuresA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb; half a pint of milk is 1 cup. Compressed yeast cakes were not a standard size, so half a cake is only approximate; start with about 1 teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast. The "teacupful of homemade yeast" is a liquid barm and has no exact dry equivalent.
- This is a stiff doughOne cup of liquid to a pound of flour is about 50 percent hydration, firmer than most modern roll doughs. That stiffness is deliberate: it holds the sharp cut edge and gives the close, slightly chewy crumb these rolls are meant to have. Expect to work it hard in the morning, and add milk only a spoonful at a time if it will not come together.
- Do not stir itThe instruction to pour the warm milk into the centre of the flour and leave it alone is the hinge of the recipe. The liquid ferments in place through a cool night and the flour is only incorporated the next morning, which develops flavour without over-fermenting a small quantity of yeast. Stirring at night risks a dough that has over-fermented by the time you come to it.
- "Where it is cool"A cool larder rather than a warm kitchen; the recipe gives no temperature. A modern kitchen at 70F may over-ferment the dough by morning, and refrigerating it is one way to keep it cool, though it will then need longer to warm and rise the next day.
- The featherA trimmed wing feather was the standard pastry brush of the period. A soft silicone or bristle brush does the same job; the butter keeps the tops tender and stops a skin forming as they proof.
- The missing ovenNo temperature is given; the book leaves the oven to the cook's judgement. As a modern equivalent, bake small rolls like these at around 425F for about 12-15 minutes, until well browned. "When light" means proofed until visibly puffed and slow to spring back, perhaps 45 minutes to an hour in a warm room.
- Shape and yieldA cutter 3 inches by 1 inch on dough half an inch thick gives the long, narrow finger shape. From a pound of flour expect about 20 to 24 rolls, enough for a dinner table of eight to ten.
Finger rolls are generally associated with American dinner-table bread of the later nineteenth century, when a household that could afford it might serve small individual rolls rather than cut slices from a household loaf. The overnight method here is a survival from an older way of baking: the dough is set at night, worked at daybreak, and on the table by dinner, which fits a kitchen where the range was lit early and never quite went out. The half cake of compressed yeast is the modern touch — commercially pressed fresh yeast reached American cooks from around the late 1860s and 1870s and spread through the 1880s and 1890s, and books of this period often offer it alongside the older homemade barm, as this one does, for households that had not yet made the switch. The feather brush, by contrast, is pure kitchen conservatism; it appears in English and American receipt books long before this one.