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Lebanon Rusk
One cup mashed potatoes, one of sugar, one of home-made yeast, three eggs; mix together; when raised light, add half cup butter or lard, and flour to make a soft dough, and, when quite light, mold into small cakes, and let them rise again before baking. If wanted for tea, set about nine A. M. - Mrs. J. S. Stahr, Lancaster, Pa.
A sweet potato-dough roll built on a liquid homemade yeast, which is both the leaven and the only liquid in the recipe. Everything else follows from replacing it correctly.
- The cup of home-made yeastNineteenth-century household yeast was a thin liquid, usually potato- or hop-based, and a cup of it supplied about 8 fl oz of hydration along with the ferment. Substitute 1 cup lukewarm water or milk plus 2 teaspoons instant or 1 packet active dry yeast, or the dough will be far too stiff.
- SaltNone is listed. Salted butter or lard may have supplied a little, but the omission is unexplained. Add 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons with the flour if you want the sweetness balanced.
- The sugar is not a typoA full cup makes a rich, cake-like dough that ferments slowly and browns fast. Expect long rises and check the bottoms early.
- PotatoesPresumably plain mashed boiled potato, without milk, butter or seasoning, and cooled to lukewarm before it meets the yeast. One cup is roughly one large russet. The starch helps keep these rusks soft.
- Flour to make a soft doughFigure 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 cups all-purpose. Stop while the dough is still slightly tacky; the potato hides stiffness until after baking, when it reads as dryness.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes for small cakes. Sweet enriched dough at 425F will color before the center sets.
- The nine A.M. scheduleThe instruction assumes a slow wild leaven and three separate rises. With modern yeast the sponge is light in 1 to 1 1/2 hours, the dough in another hour, and the shaped cakes in 45 minutes, so a mid-afternoon start suffices for tea.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 small rolls, depending on how small you mold them.
"Rusk" originally meant bread twice-baked to keep, and it still does in Dutch and British usage, but in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s the word had drifted to mean a sweet, rich, yeast-raised roll served fresh at tea. The recipe appears to come from a compilation of contributed recipes, and this one carries the name of its donor and her town in the usual way; Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding Pennsylvania German country are often said to have favored potato-based sweet doughs, to which this may well be a relation. Potato in bread was practical rather than fashionable: it stretched wheat flour, fed a homemade leaven, and kept the crumb moist for a day or two. The nine A.M. timing is the most revealing line in the recipe, since it assumes a cook who is in the kitchen all day and a leaven whose speed she knows by long acquaintance rather than by any measurement.