French Rolls
One pint of milk, scalded; put into it while hot, half a cupful of sugar (if sugar is desired), and one tablespoonful of butter; when the milk is cool, add a little salt and a half cupful of yeast, or one compressed yeast cake; stir in flour to make a stiff sponge, and when light, mix as for bread. Let it rise until light, punch it down with the hand, and let it rise again-repeat two or three times; then turn the dough onto the molding board and pound with the rolling pin until thin enough to cut. Cut out with a tumbler, brush the surface of each one with melted butter and fold over. Let the rolls rise on the tins; bake and while warm, brush over the surface with melted butter to make the crust tender.
A sponge-method dinner roll, folded in the Parker House style. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own yeast, so the two things it leaves out are the two things worth pinning down first.
- Yeast"Half a cupful of yeast" means liquid barm or a homemade yeast starter, which is not a thing you can buy. Use the alternative the recipe already gives: one compressed cake, equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast for this quantity of flour.
- Scalding the milkScalding killed off organisms in raw milk and was held to neutralise something in it that slackens dough (usually attributed to whey proteins rather than to enzymes). Pasteurized milk needs only to be warmed enough to melt the butter and dissolve the sugar, then cooled to about 110F before the yeast goes in.
- SugarHalf a cup to a pint of milk gives a distinctly sweet, tender roll closer to a supper bun. The parenthetical "if sugar is desired" is genuine licence; two tablespoons is enough to feed the yeast and brown the crust if you want a plainer roll.
- Flour quantityNone is given. A pint of milk with butter and sugar will take roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour in total, the first 2 to 3 going into the sponge, which should be a thick batter rather than a kneadable dough.
- The repeated risingsPunching down two or three times is not padding. It redistributes the yeast and builds the fine, close crumb these rolls are prized for. Each rise after the first is faster than the one before; go by doubling, not by the clock.
- Pounding with the rolling pinThis is the period way of degassing enriched dough without kneading it tough. Modern practice is the same thing more gently: roll the dough out to about 1/2 inch, which is thin enough to cut and fold.
- Cutting and foldingA tumbler is a drinking glass, about 3 inches across; a round cutter does the same work. Brushing with butter before folding the round not quite in half is what keeps the two halves from fusing, the same handling now generally associated with the Parker House roll.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature. Bake at 400F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold. Butter them the moment they come out, while the steam is still escaping, or the crust sets firm.
- YieldAbout 24 rolls from a pint of milk, depending on the size of your tumbler.
The shape described here, a round of dough buttered and folded over on itself, is the roll generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston in the 1870s, though nineteenth-century cookbooks distributed it under various names, "French rolls" among them. "French" in American cookery of this period is often said to have signalled refinement rather than a documented French original: a roll for the dinner table rather than a loaf for the family. What dates the recipe most clearly is the yeast: half a cupful of liquid yeast, meaning a homemade starter kept alive on the pantry shelf, offered alongside the compressed cake that Fleischmann and others had made widely available by the 1890s. Cookbooks of the turn of the century routinely gave both, perhaps because some households had not yet given up their own barm.