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Sweet Rusk
One pint of warm milk, one-half cup of butter, one cup of sugar, two eggs, one teaspoon of salt, two-thirds cup of compressed yeast. Make sponge with milk, yeast and flour enough for a thin batter, and let rise over night. In the morning add butter, eggs and sugar well beaten together, then salt and flour enough to make a soft dough. Mould with hands into balls and let rise until very light, then bake.
— Mrs. Hamilton J. Jones
A standard overnight enriched sweet dough, written for a cook who already knew what rusk dough should feel like. The flour is never measured, so the whole recipe hinges on judging consistency by hand.
- The hinge: flour by feelThe sponge wants a thin, pourable batter — roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour into the pint of milk. In the morning add flour only until the dough is soft and slightly tacky, likely another 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cups. Adding enough to make a firm, easily handled dough gives dry, bready rusk instead of tender.
- Compressed yeastCompressed yeast was sold in moist cakes and crumbled by volume. Two-thirds of a cup is on the order of 3 to 4 ounces of fresh cake yeast — far more than an overnight sponge needs by modern reckoning. About 1 1/2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast will raise this dough overnight at cool room temperature; more will make it rise and collapse before morning.
- Warm milkWarm means blood-warm, 100–110F. Many recipes of this period called for milk to be scalded before use; the recipe here does not say to, and with pasteurized milk the step is unnecessary. If you do scald, let the milk cool before it meets the yeast.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the cook judged her range. Enriched sweet dough of this kind bakes at 375F, 15 to 20 minutes for balls the size of a large egg, until deep gold.
- "Let rise until very light"The shaped balls should roughly double and hold a slow dent when pressed. Enriched doughs with a cup of sugar ferment sluggishly, so this second rise can run well over an hour.
- YieldA pint of milk with this much butter, sugar and egg makes about 24 to 30 rolls.
- If you want actual ruskRusk proper is twice-baked. To finish them in the older sense, split or slice the cooled rolls and dry them in a 250–300F oven until crisp and lightly toasted through.
Rusk covers a broad family of breads that share one idea: a bread baked, then dried a second time so it keeps. The word is generally traced into English from Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a coiled or ring-shaped roll of bread, though the derivation is not certain; by the nineteenth century American cookbooks used "rusk" loosely for both the crisp twice-baked slices and the soft sweet rolls they were made from — which is why this receipt stops at "then bake" without mentioning drying at all. Sweet rusk belonged to the overnight rhythm of a household kitchen: sponge set after supper, dough finished and shaped before breakfast, the yeast bought as a moist cake that had to be used quickly. That this one carries a contributor's name, Mrs. Hamilton J. Jones, is typical of church and village compilations, where receipts circulated as personal property and were credited accordingly.