Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rusks, Tea
Rusks, Tea
Dissolve half a tea-spoonful of saleratus and a tea-spoonful of salt in a spoonful of hot water. Stir this in with a pint of warm milk and one-eighth of a pint of brewer's yeast. Put the liquor into a bowl, and stir into it as much fine flour as will make a soft lithe dough. Knead this thoroughly, cover it with a cloth, and put it in a warm place to rise. It will be light in a couple of hours. Work into the dough two table-spoonfuls of sugar and a quarter of a pound of butter dissolved, but not hot. Flour the hands thoroughly, and make the dough up into small cakes the size of an orange, lay these side by side in a buttered pan, brush the tops over with milk, and bake in a quick oven. Serve hot. Time to bake, half an hour.
A soft enriched tea roll rather than the dry twice-baked rusk the name usually suggests. The main thing the text omits is a second rise after the butter and sugar go in — skip it and the rolls bake dense.
- SaleratusPotassium or sodium bicarbonate — baking soda. Half a teaspoon here is not a leavener in any real sense; with brewer's yeast doing the lifting, its job is to soften the dough and blunt any sourness in the barm.
- Brewer's yeastLiquid barm skimmed from fermenting beer, not the inactive nutritional flakes sold under that name today. One-eighth of a pint is about 1/4 cup of active liquid barm; roughly 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast gives comparable lift.
- Pints and spoonfulsIf the pint is imperial (20 fl oz), that is about 2 1/2 cups of warm milk; an American pint of 16 fl oz would give 2 cups. "A spoonful" of hot water is most likely a tablespoon. Warm means blood temperature, not hot, or the yeast suffers.
- Butter dissolved, not hotMelted and cooled to barely warm. Hot butter kills yeast and slackens the gluten you have just kneaded.
- The missing second riseWorking two tablespoons of sugar and a quarter pound of butter into risen dough knocks all the gas out of it. After shaping, cover the pan and let the rolls prove until visibly puffed, 45 minutes to an hour, before they go in.
- Quick ovenCommonly glossed at somewhere around 400-450F, which is too fierce for a sweet buttery dough held half an hour. 400F for 20-25 minutes browns them without scorching the sugar; they are done at an internal 190F or so.
- YieldThe dough gives roughly 10 to 12 rolls the size stated. Baked side by side they touch and pull apart soft, which is the intended effect.
- ServingServe hot, as directed — enriched doughs with this much butter stale fast. Day-old rusks split and dried in a low oven make the crisp version of the same name.
"Rusk" is generally traced to Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a coil or twist of bread, and by the eighteenth century it meant bread baked, sliced and baked again until dry — ship's provision, invalid food, and something to give teething children. Tea rusks like these belong to a softer nineteenth-century branch of the family: sweetened, buttered, yeast-raised rolls served straight from the oven at the tea table, with the twice-baking treated as optional and applied only to leftovers. The recipe demonstrates a barm-raised enriched dough, the standard domestic technique before compressed yeast became reliably available in British shops in the later 1800s. Brewer's yeast tied the baking day to the local brewery, and its variable strength and bitterness are part of the background against which the saleratus was used.