Milk Bread Rolls

A little history

Small individual loaves are baked all over Europe, under many names: Brötchen or Semmeln in Germany and Austria, panini in Italy. Britain alone has the roll, bap, barm cake, batch, bread cake, bun, cob, teacake and muffin.

What you call one depends on where you grew up. In a 2018 YouGov survey of almost 25,000 people in England, 52% said “bread roll” or “roll”, the only name used across the whole country. “Bun” was the choice of most people in County Durham, Tyne and Wear and Northumberland, and “cob” of most in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. “Barm” or “barm cake” led in Greater Manchester, “teacake” came second in West Yorkshire and “batch” second in Warwickshire, while “bap” had its strongest following in Staffordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire.

The bap is Scottish. The Dictionaries of the Scots Language define it as a small, thick roll of bread, often diamond-shaped, baked in the oven: a morning roll. Their earliest example is from Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany of 1724, which promises “farls, and baps”, and F. Marian McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen (1929) gives a traditional bap of flour, salt, lard, yeast, sugar, milk and water, very close to our soft white rolls.

The barm cake, a soft, round, flattish roll from North West England, takes its name from barm, the yeasty froth that forms on fermenting ale. Barm was one of British bakers’ original sources of yeast; it faded from use in the 19th century as compressed yeast, the fresh yeast in our recipes, became widely available.

The Kaiser roll (Kaisersemmel) is Austrian: white flour, yeast, malt, water and salt, with the top cut or folded into five curved segments. It is often said to be named after Emperor Franz Joseph, but the name is already in print by 1825, more than twenty years before his reign began. Rolls very like it sit beside each plate in Martin van Meytens’s painting of a court dinner at the Hofburg in the 1760s, and under Austrian rule in Lombardy Italian bakers made a hollow version, the michetta or rosetta.

Brioche is French. The word is first recorded in 1404, and Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary of 1611 describes it as “a rowle, or bunne, of spiced bread”, of Norman origin. The famous “let them eat brioche” (usually translated as cake) was not Marie Antoinette’s: Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives it to “a great princess” in his Confessions. Today brioche is a favourite burger bun.

Soft milk-bread rolls are a Japanese style. Bread spread in Japan after the Second World War, when relief shipments of wheat helped with rice shortages. The trick behind their softness, cooking a little of the flour in liquid first, comes from the Japanese yudane (or yukone) and was popularised across Asia as tangzhong by the Taiwanese cookery writer Yvonne Chen.