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Rusks Made with Sour Cream
Rub five ounces of butter into a pound of flour till it is as fine as oatmeal. Add a pinch of salt, four table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, and two ounces of candied peel finely shredded. Work all into a smooth lithe dough with two well-beaten eggs and a little more than half a pint of thick sour cream. At the last moment before baking the cakes add half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda mixed with a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar and a tea-spoonful of flour. Divide the dough into two or three cakes, and bake in a moderate oven. When done enough, take them out of the oven, tear in halves, and put them back again to crisp. Of course, the cream must not be in the least putrid when it is used. Time to bake, forty to fifty minutes.
A twice-baked sweet bread rather than a cake: the dough is baked in large rounds, torn open, and returned to the oven to dry. The soda goes in at the very last moment, and that is the instruction the recipe hinges on.
- Soda last, oven readyThe half teaspoon of carbonate of soda is plain baking soda, cut with sugar and flour so it disperses evenly through a stiff dough. It reacts immediately with the acid in the sour cream, so have the tins greased and the oven at temperature before it goes in; any delay costs you the rise.
- Sour creamAn Imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, so "a little more than half a pint" means roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 cups. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream works, as does creme fraiche thinned slightly; both are reliably acidic, which is what the soda needs. Low-fat versions give a drier crumb.
- The warning about putrid creamIn nineteenth-century kitchens cream soured on its own, sometimes past the point of being pleasant. Cultured dairy from a shop is acidified deliberately and is not the same gamble, but the underlying point stands: use cream that smells clean and tart, not off.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is usually taken to be somewhere around 350F. Bake the rounds 40 to 50 minutes as directed; for the crisping stage a lower oven, around 275-300F, will dry the torn faces rather than colour them further -- roughly 15 to 25 minutes, until they feel dry.
- Tear, do not cutThe recipe specifies tearing the hot cakes in half, which leaves a rough, open surface to dry out. Work quickly with a cloth while they are still hot.
- "Lithe" doughLithe here means supple and pliable -- soft enough to shape by hand but not sticky or pourable. Hold back a little of the cream and add it only if the flour will take it, since modern flours absorb differently.
- Candied peelTwo ounces of candied citron, orange or lemon peel, shredded fine. Buy whole candied peel and cut it yourself if you can; the pre-diced mixed peel sold for fruitcake is wetter and more syrupy.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour divided into two or three cakes, each torn in half, gives four to six rusks. Once fully dry they keep for weeks in a tin.
Rusk is generally derived from the Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a coil or twist of bread, though the origin is not certain; in English the word came to mean bread baked, broken and baked again until dry. That second baking was the whole point in a period before airtight packaging: rusks travelled, kept in a tin through a damp winter, went to sea, and were fed to invalids and teething children. Soured dairy was a routine fact of a household that took milk daily and had no refrigeration -- the acid was too useful to waste, and paired with carbonate of soda it gave a lift. The stern note that the cream "must not be in the least putrid" is a reminder of how fine that line was.