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Rusks, with Jam
Pour a pint of boiling milk--sweetened and flavoured--over five or six rusks in a pie-dish. Let them soak for ten minutes, then beat them lightly with a fork, and spread upon them a layer of good jam. Pour upon this some custard made with a pint of milk, the yolks of three eggs, and a little sugar and flavouring. Leave the preparation till cold, sift powdered sugar over it, or lay upon it the whites of the eggs beaten to foam, and serve. Time, three-quarters of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
An unbaked ancestor of queen of pudding, assembled cold in layers. The whole thing depends on a custard that thickens without curdling, since nothing here goes into the oven to rescue it.
- The hinge: the custardA pint of milk to three yolks is a thin pouring custard, and it must be stirred over gentle heat until it coats the spoon at around 175-180F and no higher. Above that the yolks scramble, and there is no baking stage to hide it; strain it into a jug the moment it thickens.
- RusksVictorian rusks are twice-baked bread, dry and hard, like Dutch beschuit or Italian fette biscottate rather than a soft roll. Five or six of them amount to only a few ounces, depending on size; plain melba toast or dry sponge fingers behave similarly, but avoid anything sweet and buttery, which will collapse to paste.
- PintsCassell's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so read each "pint of milk" as 2 1/2 cups. Two pints of milk in total, one for soaking and one for the custard.
- "Flavoured"Left deliberately open. Period practice was to infuse the hot milk with lemon peel, a bay leaf, a vanilla pod or a grating of nutmeg for ten minutes, then strain. Vanilla extract stirred in at the end works, but the infusion gives the rounder flavour.
- Beating the soaked rusksBreak them up lightly with a fork only. Worked too hard they turn to a smooth pap and the pudding loses the loose, spoonable texture that carries the jam.
- Jam layerWarm the jam slightly and spread it in a thin, even layer so the custard does not sink through and marble everything grey-pink. Raspberry and apricot are common choices.
- The meringue optionWhites "beaten to foam" are laid on raw and never cooked. If you want that finish, use pasteurized whites, or pipe the meringue on and brown it briefly under a hot grill or with a blowtorch. The sifted powdered sugar alternative in the original avoids the question entirely.
- Timing and yieldThree-quarters of an hour is presumably the working time; the recipe then simply says to leave the preparation till cold, which will take a couple of hours or more. It serves five or six as written and is best eaten the day it is made, before the rusks go slack.
Rusk puddings sit in the large Victorian family of dishes built from stale or twice-baked bread, milk, jam and eggs: bread and butter pudding, cabinet pudding, and above all queen of puddings, which layers breadcrumbs, jam and baked meringue in the same order. Rusks themselves were a staple of the nineteenth-century store cupboard, sold hard and dry so they would keep for months, and were closely associated with nursery and invalid cookery, where they were softened in warm milk for children and convalescents. Cassell's, published in parts in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, gives the probable cost of nearly every dish, and 1s 2d for a pudding feeding six shows exactly what such recipes were for: turning storable staples and a spoonful of preserve into a company dessert without lighting the oven. The cold assembly here, with no baking at all, is the economical version of the same idea, meringue or sifted sugar standing in for a browned top.