Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Rusk (One pint milk three eggs one)
Rusk (One pint milk three eggs one)
One pint milk, three eggs, one tea-cup each of butter and sugar, and one coffee-cup potato yeast; thicken with flour, and sponge over night; in the morning stir down, let rise, and stir down again; when it rises make into a loaf, and let rise again; then roll out like soda biscuit, cut and put in pans, and, when light, bake carefully. Or when baking take four cups dough, one-half cup butter, one cup sugar, three eggs; mix thoroughly, adding enough flour to mold easily; let rise, make into rather high and narrow biscuit, let rise again, rub the tops with a little sugar and water, then sprinkle over them dry sugar. Bake twenty minutes.
A sweet enriched breakfast bread built on a wild-ish potato yeast and an overnight sponge. Two versions are given: one from scratch, one that borrows four cups of risen dough from the day's bread baking.
- Cup sizesNineteenth-century cup measures were not standardized and this book does not define them. A tea-cup is usually taken as somewhat less than a modern cup, a coffee-cup as roughly a full cup. Read the first version as about 3/4 cup each butter and sugar, and about a cup of yeast liquid.
- Potato yeastA homemade leaven of mashed potato, sugar and flour kept going in a crock, contributing both leavening and liquid. Two and a quarter teaspoons (one packet) of instant or active dry yeast will raise this dough, but you must add back roughly a cup of liquid, and the tang the potato yeast gave will be missing.
- "Thicken with flour"No flour quantity is given anywhere in the recipe, which is normal for the period. Work toward a soft, moldable dough — around 5 to 6 cups for the first version — and stop while it is still slightly tacky, since butter, sugar and eggs all soften it further.
- The sponge and the knock-backsThe repeated "stir down, let rise, stir down" is not padding. A heavily sugared, buttered dough ferments slowly and unevenly, and the deflations redistribute the yeast and build flavor. Expect the overnight sponge at cool room temperature, then several hours of morning work across the successive rises.
- "Bake carefully"The book gives no oven heat; the phrase asks for watchfulness. A moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading. The sugar in the dough and the sugar on top will color long before the centers set; if the tops darken early, tent with foil. The stated twenty minutes belongs to the second version's small high biscuits.
- The sugar glazeIn the second version the tops are rubbed with a little sugar and water and then dusted with dry sugar, giving a crackled, slightly crunchy lid. The recipe has this done after the second rise and immediately before baking.
- The dough-borrowing versionThe second method assumes you already have risen bread dough in the kitchen. It will take a good deal of extra flour to absorb the added butter, sugar and eggs.
- YieldNeither version says; expect roughly a couple of dozen biscuit-sized rusks from either, depending on how they are cut.
Rusk in nineteenth-century American usage often meant something other than the twice-baked dry biscuit the word denotes in Britain and northern Europe; here it is a sweet, egg-and-butter yeast roll, closer to a plain brioche, though the older sense is said to survive in the habit of drying leftover rusks in a slow oven for invalids and teething children. Its appearance in Buckeye Cookery (1877) reflects a household where bread dough was in the crock most mornings anyway, which is why the second version simply enriches four cups of what is already rising. Potato yeast — flour and sugar fermented in potato water, refreshed every few days — is generally associated with Ohio kitchens before reliable compressed yeast reached general grocery trade, and cookbooks of this period sometimes give both a from-scratch and a borrow-the-dough route so the cook could fit sweet baking around the bread schedule rather than the other way round.