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French Rolls
Dissolve a teacupful of yeast in 1 quart of warm milk, add 1 pound of fine flour, and set to rise 3 hours. Add a tablespoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt, and make it into a dough. Let it rise now 4 hours, then knead it on a board, roll very thin, cut in squares, fold as above, make into horseshoes, bake them, after brushing them with melted butter, and setting to rise for 1/2 hour, for 15 minutes, in a hot oven.
A two-stage sponge-and-dough method with one large omission: the flour that turns the batter into a dough is never quantified. Read the whole thing before you begin, and expect to judge by feel.
- The missing flourOne pound of flour in a quart of milk is a thin batter, not a dough. The sponge takes that pound; a good deal more is needed at the second stage. A quart of milk is about two pounds of liquid, so expect to work in at least as much flour again and quite possibly two or three times that, until the dough is soft but no longer sticky. The original leaves this to the cook's hands, and there is no honest way to convert it.
- A teacupful of yeastThis means liquid yeast or barm, poured by volume, not a modern packet. Because the total flour is never stated, any conversion is approximate: something in the region of 2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast, or a scant tablespoon of active dry, is a reasonable starting point.
- Rising timesThree hours for the sponge and four for the dough reflect weak nineteenth-century yeast and a cold kitchen. With modern yeast at room temperature, expect the sponge to be foaming and slack in about an hour and the dough to double in one to two. Overshooting these times leaves a sour, collapsed dough.
- "Fold as above"The instruction refers back to an earlier recipe in the book, which is not reproduced here, so the exact fold cannot be recovered. Cut squares of about 4 inches, fold corner to corner or in thirds, and bend the ends round into horseshoes.
- A hot oven425 to 450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for small rolls; below about 400F they dry out before they colour.
- The second butter brushingThe butter brushing -- Butter goes on before the final half-hour proof, so the surface stays supple as the rolls expand rather than setting into a skin. A second brush as they leave the oven gives a gloss.
- YieldThe finished dough will weigh well over two pounds; the quart of milk alone is about two pounds, and the flour worked in at the second stage adds substantially more. The count therefore depends entirely on how much flour goes in and how large the squares are cut, so judge by size rather than a fixed number. They are best eaten the day they are baked.
The "French roll" of Victorian and Edwardian English cookbooks is a broad label rather than a fixed formula: it covered any small milk-enriched roll made with a wet sponge and a light hand, in contrast to the plainer household loaf. The folding and the horseshoe shape here point toward the crescent forms that English and American cooks generally associated with Vienna and Paris bakeries, though the layering is far simpler than laminated croissant dough as it later became standardised. The long risings are a reminder that before packaged yeast, leaven was homemade or bought as brewer's barm, and its strength was never quite the same twice.