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Rusk (Two tea-cups raised dough one)
Two tea-cups raised dough, one tea-cup sugar, half cup butter, two well-beaten eggs, flour enough to make a stiff dough; set to rise, and when light, mold into high biscuit, and let rise again; sift sugar and cinnamon over the top, and place in oven. - Mrs. Mary Lee Gere, Champaign, Ill.
This is a sweet enriched roll built on a piece of bread dough borrowed from the day's baking, so the method assumes you already have risen dough on hand. Everything hinges on that starting dough being fully alive.
- Raised doughThis means plain risen white bread dough, taken after its first rise. Two tea-cups is somewhere in the region of three-quarters of a pound to a pound, depending on how airy the dough is and how firmly it is packed into the cup. If you are not baking bread, mix a lean dough of 3 cups flour, 1 cup water, 2 tsp yeast and 1 tsp salt and let it double first.
- Tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, commonly around 3/4 cup. That gives roughly 1 1/2 cups dough by volume and about 3/4 cup sugar. The butter is written as "half cup", not half a tea-cup, so read it as about 1/2 cup.
- "Flour enough"Genuinely open-ended, and the amount depends on how wet your base dough is. Expect 1 to 1 1/2 cups more; stop when the dough is stiff enough to hold a shape but still tacky. Over-flouring is the usual way these rusks turn dry.
- Working in the fat and sugarAdding sugar, butter and eggs to already-risen dough slackens it badly and slows the yeast. Knead until it comes back together and smooth, and expect the second and third rises to take longer than a plain bread dough, an hour or more each.
- "High biscuit"Tall round rolls, shaped like a scone rather than flattened, set close together on a greased pan so they support one another as they rise. Six to eight from this quantity.
- OvenNo temperature is given; 375F is right for enriched rolls this size, 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the centre reads about 190F.
- Sugar and cinnamon toppingBrushing the risen tops with milk or beaten egg first will help the dry mixture stick. Use about 2 tbsp sugar to 1/2 tsp cinnamon.
- Eating and keepingBest warm the day they are made. In period usage rusk was often split, dried out in a slow oven and kept as a hard biscuit for invalids and children, which is worth knowing if you find yourself with stale ones.
"Rusk" originally meant bread twice-baked to drive out the moisture so it would keep, the same idea behind zwieback and biscotti, and the word is generally traced through Spanish and Portuguese rosca, a coil or twist of bread. By the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in 1877, American usage had drifted: rusk here means a soft sweet roll, and only sometimes gets the second drying. Yeast was slow and fussy to raise, so a cook who already had bread dough working simply took two teacups of it, enriched it with sugar, butter and eggs, and turned part of the day's bread into a tea cake.