Home › The Principles of Cookery › Vienna Rusks
Vienna Rusks
Required, two pounds of Vienna flour, half a pint each of milk and water, two ounces of castor sugar, the same of butter, one ounce of French or German yeast, a salt-spoonful of salt, and two eggs. Mix the yeast and sugar with a little of the milk and water, blended, and just tepid. Take care to have no lumps in the yeast. Then add about one-fourth of the flour to form the sponge, cover, and leave it to rise. When fully risen, stir in the butter, just melted, and the eggs, with the rest of the flour and the salt, and mix into a light dough on a board. Cover for an hour, then form the dough into long rolls about the thickness of a rolling-pin; grease the sides that they may part more easily, and put together on a tin. Set this over boiling water, and lay a cloth over. In twenty to thirty minutes bake the rolls on a slightly-greased tin in a sharp oven. Break them apart, and leave until next day, then rasp the tops and bottoms and cut the rolls into thin slices. Lay these on tins or wires and brown in the oven on both sides. When quite cold, store in tins with well-fitting lids. Probable cost, 1s.
A twice-baked bread in the Austrian manner: enriched rolls proofed over steam, baked hard, then split, sliced and dried to a crisp. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the yeast quantity need translating.
- Vienna flourRoller-milled, high-protein flour of the sort exported from Hungary and Austria in the late nineteenth century. Strong white bread flour is the direct equivalent; ordinary all-purpose will give a softer, less crisp rusk.
- Yeast"French or German yeast" is fresh compressed yeast. One ounce (28 g) for 2 lb flour is a brisk dose by modern standards; about 9 g of instant dried yeast is the equivalent, and it can be rubbed straight into the flour rather than slaked in the liquid.
- Liquid and saltHalf a pint each of milk and water is 10 imperial fl oz apiece, roughly 1¼ US cups each, giving a firm dough with the eggs. A salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, which is very little for 2 lb of flour; most bakers today would use two teaspoons or more.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Granulated dissolves perfectly well in the tepid milk here.
- Proofing over boiling waterThe tin set over a pan of boiling water under a cloth is a improvised proofing cabinet: warm, humid, and quick. A turned-off oven with a tray of hot water on the floor does the same job.
- A sharp oven425-450F (220-230C) for the first bake. The rolls should be well coloured and sound hollow; underbaked rolls will not rasp cleanly.
- RaspingTo rasp is to grate the crust off with a fine grater or rasp, leaving a pale, even surface. Doing it the next day, when the crumb has firmed, is deliberate and worth following.
- The second bakeThe recipe directs that the slices be browned on both sides; the object is to dry them through rather than just colour the surface, so a moderate to low oven and turning will help. Slices left with residual moisture will soften in the tin.
- Yield and keepingStored fully cold in an airtight tin, the rusks keep for weeks.
Rusks are among the oldest forms of preserved bread: baked once for eating, twice for keeping, the same logic that gives German Zwieback ("twice-baked") and Italian biscotti. What makes these Viennese is the flour and the steam. Austrian and Hungarian mills led Europe in roller-milling through the middle of the nineteenth century, producing a fine, strong flour that made an unusually light, glossy-crusted bread, and "Vienna bread" became a fashionable term in British and American bakeries, a vogue generally traced to the Vienna bakery at the 1867 Paris Exposition and, in the United States, to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. Cassell's seems to place the recipe among its bread and fermented goods for practical reasons rather than novelty: a dry rusk stored in a well-fitting tin was often said to be nursery and sickroom food, easy on the digestion. The cost noted, one shilling, is for the whole batch.