Twin Biscuit
Roll light biscuit dough thin; cut it into rounds. Spread half of these with soft butter, cover with the remaining circles. Bake the same as Vienna rolls.
Two rounds of dough with butter between them, baked as one — the ancestor of the modern Parker House roll and of any "pull-apart" biscuit that opens along a buttered seam. The recipe is a cross-reference, so most of the technique lives in the two recipes it points at.
- "Light biscuit dough"In books of this period light often means yeast-raised rather than chemically leavened, and the instruction to bake like Vienna rolls points the same way. The term is not used consistently, so check your book's own biscuit section; if it offers both, the yeasted one suits this best.
- Roll thinPerhaps a quarter of an inch for each round, though the recipe says only "thin." Rolled thick, the two layers bake into one dense lump and the point of the thing is lost.
- The butter is the hingeSoft butter, spread to within a little of the edge, is what keeps the two rounds from fusing. It steams the layers apart in the oven so the roll opens cleanly at table. Melted butter soaks in and welds them; use it at spreading consistency, not liquid.
- CuttingA 2 to 2 1/2 inch cutter gives a dinner-roll size. Cut straight down without twisting, as with any raised dough, so the edges rise evenly.
- Second riseIf the dough is yeast-raised, the assembled rounds will need to prove on the pan until puffy before baking; the recipe leaves this to the reader, as it leaves everything else, to the Vienna roll instructions.
- Vienna-roll ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; it defers entirely to the Vienna roll recipe, which you should follow if your book has it. A hot oven is the usual modern reading. Vienna rolls were characteristically baked with steam in the first minutes to get the thin crisp crust, which in a home oven means a pan of boiling water on the floor of the oven or a few spritzes as the rolls go in.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Yield depends entirely on how much biscuit dough you start with and the size of your cutter, each twin using two rounds.
Recipes of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century taste for rolls that could be broken open without a knife: the Parker House fold, the cloverleaf, the finger roll and this twinned round all appear in American cookbooks in roughly the same period, though they are not easily grouped as a single fashion with one shared mechanism. The name is purely descriptive wo rrounds of the same dough, married. The instruction to bake "the same as Vienna rolls" points to the other fashion of the era, the crusty steam-baked Austrian roll that reached American bakeries after the Vienna Bakery at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial made both the rolls and the compressed yeast that raised them widely known. That a household book could simply write "bake the same as Vienna rolls" and expect to be understood says a good deal about how thoroughly the style had settled in.