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Pocketbook Rolls

A yeasted dough roll with lard, butter, and eggs, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Pocketbook Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, salt, sugar, lard, yeast, and eggs.

  2. Add enough warm water to form a dough.

  3. In summer, prepare the dough at 10 a.m.; in winter, at 8 a.m.

  4. Incorporate half the lard into the dough during the first mixing.

  5. After the first rise, add the remaining lard and a little more flour.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough into strips about the size of your hand.

  2. Spread butter on each strip and roll them up like a pocketbook.

  3. Place the rolls in buttered tins and let them rise until light.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once mixed with water.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the dough.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and gives a softer crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and promotes browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the rolls rise until light. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas; under-proofed rolls stay dense, while over-proofed ones may collapse in the oven.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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