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Vienna Rolls
These excellent rolls are served fresh, for breakfast, with good coffee, with whipped cream on top, unsalted butter, and fresh eggs, sometimes honey, too. They should be eaten the same day as made. Mix 2 1/2 pints of flour, 3 eggs, 1 gill of milk, 1 ounce of yeast, melted in the milk, and a pinch of salt, Beat all well; set aside to rise. Put on a floured board, roll into a thin sheet, cut into squares of 6 inches, fold these across so that a point comes on top, pull the ends to form a horse-shoe, paint with white of egg to make them flaky, and bake in a hot oven.
A plain yeast dough shaped into crescents, closer to an Austrian Kipferl than to a modern croissant. The instructions assume a baker who knows what bread dough should feel like, and the stated liquid is the one thing that will not work as written.
- The liquid is shortTwo and a half pints of flour is roughly 5 cups, and one gill of milk is half a cup. With three eggs that gives a dough far too dry to come together, let alone roll thin. Add milk until you have a soft, smooth dough — expect to need something closer to a cup and a quarter in total, added gradually.
- YeastOne ounce means fresh compressed yeast, sold in cakes. Substitute about 1 tablespoon of active dry or instant yeast, and dissolve it in milk warmed to blood heat.
- "Hot oven"425–450F. These rolls are thin and lean, and want fast heat for 12–15 minutes; at a lower temperature they dry out before they colour.
- RisingNo time is given. Let the dough double at room temperature, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, then give the shaped crescents 30–40 minutes on the sheet before baking, or they bake up dense.
- ShapingSix-inch squares folded corner to corner give triangles; the recipe then says only to pull the ends round into a horse-shoe, though rolling each from the long side toward the point is the more usual crescent method. Rolling the sheet thin — 1/8 inch or so — matters more than the exact square size.
- The egg whiteEgg white alone sets to a thin, crisp shell, which may be what the recipe means by "flaky." A whole-egg or yolk wash gives more gloss and deeper colour, so use white if you want the original effect.
- No fat, no sugarThere is no butter or sugar in this dough. It is a lean roll meant to be eaten with unsalted butter and honey, and it stales within hours — the instruction to eat them the same day is accurate, not decorative.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 rolls, depending on how thin you roll the sheet.
"Vienna rolls" entered English-language cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, when Viennese baking carried enormous prestige: the Austrian bakery at the 1873 Vienna World Exposition, and again at Philadelphia in 1876, is generally credited with introducing American bakers to Vienna's fine white flour, its compressed brewer's yeast, and its steam-baked crusty rolls. The crescent shape belongs to the older Austrian Kipferl, a form documented in central Europe well before the croissant; the popular story tying it to the 1683 Turkish siege of Vienna is traditional rather than documented. This version, collected in a travel cookbook that gathers dishes country by country, is the domestic rather than the professional article — no butter laminated in, no steam-injected oven, just a lean egg dough rolled thin and curved by hand, served the way a Viennese breakfast is described throughout the period: fresh rolls, unsalted butter, honey, and coffee under whipped cream.