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Italian Rusks
Slice a stale Savoy biscuit and divide the slices into two pieces, which bake in a slow oven until they are crisp and hard. Let them cool, and put them in a dry place, and in a close tin canister, to preserve their crispness. They should be a nice brown when baked. Probable cost, 3d. per dozen. Three cakes are enough for one dozen rusks.
A drying recipe rather than a baking one: the point is to drive moisture out of an already-baked sponge so it keeps and crisps. Nothing here is difficult, but the oven has to be low enough that the slices dry rather than colour.
- Savoy biscuitThe Savoy is a light, dry sponge baked in a fluted mould, closer to a sponge cake than to a cookie; the small commercial version survives as the Italian savoiardi or ladyfinger. Shop-bought sponge fingers, brioche or a plain pound-cake-style sponge all rusk well, though a very buttery cake will go leathery rather than brittle.
- Slow ovenIn Victorian usage this is roughly 250-300F. The lower end suits drying rather than baking, though note that the recipe does expect the rusks to take 'a nice brown'.
- Cut thicknessThe original says slice and halve, with no measurement. About half an inch is right; thinner slices scorch, thicker ones stay soft at the core and go stale in the tin.
- Judging donenessTurn the pieces once part way through and go by feel rather than time — usually 25 to 40 minutes depending on thickness. They should snap cleanly when cold, not when hot, since sponge firms considerably as it cools.
- Cooling before storageThe instruction to cool fully before canistering is the hinge of the whole recipe. Sealed warm, the residual steam condenses inside the tin and the rusks soften overnight.
- The tin canisterA close tin is simply an airtight container; a lidded jar or sealed tin does the same job. Kept genuinely dry, rusks last weeks.
- Yield and costThe recipe states that three cakes give one dozen rusks. '3d. per dozen' is threepence in pre-decimal money, given as the book's 'probable cost'.
- ServingEat with tea or coffee, with butter and preserve, or broken into a bowl of warm milk, a common invalid and nursery use.
Rusk is twice-baked bread or cake, the same idea as the German Zwieback, the French biscotte and the Italian biscotti — those three names all derive from words meaning "twice baked" or "twice cooked" (the English "rusk" does not; it is generally traced to a Spanish or Portuguese word for a twist or coil of bread). The technique long predates any of the recipes: drying a baked good until no free moisture remains was the ordinary way of making bread keep on a ship, in a barracks or in a household without daily baking. What makes this version "Italian" is the base, the Savoy sponge, a light egg-foam cake traditionally associated with the House of Savoy and, by tradition rather than documented record, with the courts of Piedmont before it became a standard European confection. The recipe is essentially a thrift instruction: stale sponge that would otherwise be wasted is converted into something that keeps well, a preoccupation of Victorian household writing.