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RUSKS (another way) (Take four pounds of flour six)
Take four pounds of flour, six ounces of butter, four ounces of loaf sugar, and one quart of milk. Ferment and make into a dough as for buns, weigh it in pieces of one pound, one pound and a half, or two pounds each, and make these into long even rolls five or six inches in circumference; let them be quite straight and square at the ends, place them on buttered tins, so that they may not touch each other, flatten them a little with your hand, and prove them; when they are near proof, prick them several times along the top with a fork or small piece of wire, which will prevent the top crust or rind coming off; bake them in a moderate oven. When they are a day or two old cut them crosswise into thin slices with a sharp knife, lay them on clean tins close to each other, and put them in a brisk oven; when they are nicely coloured take them out, turn them on the other side, put them in again, and when coloured that side they are done.
A large baker's batch of twice-baked bread, written for someone who already knows how buns are made. The second bake is the whole point: it dries the slices through so they keep.
- No yeast quantity is given"Ferment and make into a dough as for buns" assumes a reader who already knows the bun method. For 4 lb of flour, a modern enriched dough would take roughly 1 oz fresh yeast, or about 3 tsp instant; the original leaves this genuinely open.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour and a quart of milk make something like six large rolls and several dozen rusks. Quartering the recipe (1 lb flour, 1½ oz butter, 1 oz sugar, 1 cup milk) gives a manageable single loaf-sized roll.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold as a hard cone, chipped and pounded before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; caster dissolves faster into the dough.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven for the first bake is usually taken as somewhere around 350F; a "brisk" oven for the second is hotter, perhaps 425-450F, which will colour thin slices quickly and needs watching. Drying them longer at a lower heat, around 300F, gives a more even, crisper rusk.
- Five or six inches in circumferenceCircumference, not diameter — that is a roll under two inches thick, so the crosswise slices come out small and round. Shape and space them accordingly.
- Docking the topsPricking the rolls just before full proof stops the crust lifting away from the crumb, which would make the slices fall apart. Do not skip it, and do it while the dough is still slightly under-proved so it does not deflate.
- The one- or two-day waitStaling is not neglect. Fresh crumb tears and drags under the knife; a day-old roll slices cleanly and thinly, which is what allows it to dry right through in the second bake.
- KeepingCool the rusks completely before storing or trapped steam softens them. Fully dried, in a tin, they keep for weeks.
Rusks are twice-baked bread, the same idea as biscotti, zwieback and ship's biscuit: driving out the moisture so bread will keep without going mouldy. The word is thought to have come into English from Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a coiled or twisted roll, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "rusk" in Britain commonly meant a sweetened, enriched slice dried in the oven and eaten with tea, with wine, or soaked in milk for invalids and teething children. The scale suggests the intended audience: four pounds of flour at a time, weighed off into pound and two-pound pieces, reads more as a bakehouse habit than a domestic one, and the dough is simply bun dough, with instructions that assume a reader who already has one going.