Home › Bread › Quick Plain Rolls
Quick Plain Rolls
Two quarts of flour sifted, a level tablespoonful of sugar, a pint (or more) of scalded milk, a level tablespoonful of butter, a teaspoonful of salt, a level tablespoonful of lard, a cake of compressed yeast. Scald the milk, dissolve in it the salt and sugar and add the butter and lard to melt them. When this mixture becomes tepid, add the yeast thoroughly dissolved in a fourth of a cupful of lukewarm water. Stir in the flour and make at once into a moderate stiff dough, adding more milk if necessary. Knead thoroughly for about twenty minutes, brush with melted butter, cover well and set in a warm place to rise. When sufficiently risen mold the dough into rolls and when the rolls have quite doubled in bulk, bake them in a hot oven. Four hours should be sufficient time for rolls made in this manner without setting a sponge. The oven should be hot enough to brown flour in one minute. Bake from ten to thirty minutes, according to the size and shape. Brush the rolls with sweet milk just before and after baking, to give them a rich brown color.
A straight-dough roll with no sponge, written for a cook who judged oven heat by browning a pinch of flour. Two things need translating: the yeast cake and the oven.
- Flour quantityTwo quarts of sifted flour is roughly 8 cups, about 2 pounds. Hold back the last cup or so and add it as the dough comes together; the recipe itself allows for adjustment, telling you to add more milk if the dough is too stiff.
- A cake of compressed yeastThat is the small fresh yeast cake of about 0.6 oz, equal to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Active dry still likes the quarter cup of lukewarm water called for here; instant can go straight into the flour.
- "Hot oven"Browning flour in one minute points to a hot oven, roughly 400-450F. Small dinner rolls would want something like 12-15 minutes at that heat; the ten-to-thirty range in the original covers everything from tiny rolls to large shaped pieces.
- Scalding the milkScalding raw milk was routine, and the usual modern explanation is that it deactivates milk components that slacken gluten. With pasteurized milk it is generally held unnecessary, but heating the milk is still the easiest way to melt the butter and lard and dissolve the salt and sugar. Cool to about 105F before the yeast goes in, as the recipe's "tepid" implies.
- LardA level tablespoon of lard alongside the butter gives tenderness and a slightly softer crumb. Shortening or an extra tablespoon of butter substitutes without trouble.
- Twenty minutes of kneadingThat is hand-kneading time. A stand mixer with a dough hook on medium-low reaches the same smooth, elastic stage in 8-10 minutes. The dough should be moderately stiff, not slack.
- The four-hour figureThis is total time from mixing to baked rolls, and it assumes a genuinely warm kitchen. In a 68F room the first rise alone can run two hours; judge by doubled bulk, not the clock.
- Milk washBrushing with whole milk before and after baking is what produces the color, and the second brushing also softens the crust as the rolls cool. Do it while they are still hot.
- YieldThis full batch makes about 30 dinner rolls. It halves cleanly.
Compressed yeast is the quiet subject of this recipe. Before reliable commercial cakes reached grocers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a cook wanting rolls set a sponge the night before with a homemade liquid or potato yeast, or kept a salt-rising or hop-based starter alive on the back of the stove. The insistence here that "four hours should be sufficient time for rolls made in this manner without setting a sponge" can plausibly be read as a selling point rather than a throwaway line: on that reading, it advertises that fresh yeast had made the overnight sponge optional. The oven test is a leftover from the older world of the same kitchen, since a cook with a wood or coal range had no thermometer and read heat by how fast a scattering of flour browned. Rolls of this type, enriched with a little sugar and a mixture of butter and lard, were standard American supper bread through the period.