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Zweibach
Sift through a tamis into a bowl half a pound of flour, and set it in a warm place to heat moderately. While this is doing make half a glass of milk just lukewarm, with a quarter of a pound of butter, a little sugar, and a pinch of salt. When this is well mixed, add the flour, stirring it well in with the yolks of two and the white of one egg. When well incorporated add a tea-spoonful of yeast passed through a tamis. The paste should be of a consistency fit to roll with the hands; if it is too soft more flour may be added until the requisite density is attained. Roll the paste into round balls, which, when baked, should be about the size of billiard balls. Bake in a quick oven.
An enriched yeast roll of the German rusk family, written in the compressed style Cassell's used for its instructional chapters. Two things are missing from the text and both matter: any rising time, and the second bake the name promises.
- Let it riseThe recipe never mentions proving. With a teaspoon of yeast in a rich, buttery dough, expect a slow first rise of 1½ to 2 hours in a warm room, then a further 30-45 minutes after shaping. Baking straight after rolling gives dense, greasy lumps.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of fine cloth or mesh. Any fine sieve serves for the flour; passing the yeast through it would have broken up lumps in whatever yeast was to hand, compressed cake yeast or barm.
- Yeast quantitiesA teaspoonful of Victorian compressed or brewer's yeast is not equivalent to a teaspoon of modern instant dried yeast, which is far more concentrated. About ½ teaspoon of instant, or 1 teaspoon of active dry proved in the warm milk, is closer in effect.
- "Half a glass of milk"Genuinely ambiguous. Period glass measures ranged from a wineglass of about 2 fl oz to a tumbler of 8 or more, so no confident conversion is possible; with 8 oz flour and 4 oz butter, judge by feel, adding milk until the paste is firm enough to roll by hand as directed.
- A quick ovenThe text gives no temperature; 'quick' is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat balls of this size take roughly 15 minutes; the high butter content browns fast, so check at 12.
- Billiard ballsRoughly 2 to 2¼ inches across (English billiard balls of the period sat at the smaller end), and the recipe means the baked size, so raw pieces of about 1½ oz; the batch should give something like eight to ten rolls.
- The missing second bakeZwieback means twice-baked. Traditionally the cooled rolls are halved or sliced and returned to a slow oven, 275-300F, until dry and crisp through. Cassell's stops at the first bake, which leaves you with soft rolls rather than rusks.
- Egg proportionsTwo yolks and one white may well be intentional rather than a misprint: the extra yolk enriches, while less white tends to keep the crumb tender.
Zwieback is German for "twice baked," the same idea that gives Italian biscotti and French biscuit their names: bread baked once for structure, then dried a second time so it keeps almost indefinitely. Rusks of this kind were long-standing ship's and traveller's provisions before they became nursery food, and by the late nineteenth century zwieback was familiar in English and American households both as a hard biscuit for teething infants and invalids and as a keeping bread for the store cupboard. Its appearance in Cassell's instructional section rather than among the breads may mean it was offered as an exercise in handling a rich yeast paste, the sort of dough stiff enough to roll between the palms. The comparison to billiard balls is a reminder that Victorian cookery writers sometimes reached for familiar household objects alongside their weights.