Rusk
1 pint of warm milk, 1/2 cupful of yeast or 1/2 cake of dried yeast. Mix sufficient flour to make a thick sponge; when light, work in 1 cupful of sugar, 2 heaping tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 or 3 well-beaten eggs, 1/2 teaspoonful salt; add flour sufficient to mould. Let rise until light, and then make into small balls. Arrange closely in a buttered tin, let rise again, then brush over with sweetened milk, and bake.
This is a sweet enriched roll built on a sponge, and the original assumes a cook who knows her dough by feel. The quantities of flour and the oven are both left to judgment, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- YeastA half cupful of nineteenth-century liquid yeast, or half a compressed/dried cake, is served well by 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Sprinkle it into the warm milk for the sponge.
- "Warm milk" means blood-warmAbout 100-110F. Scald-hot milk kills the yeast, and this sponge has nothing to fall back on.
- Flour, in numbersThe recipe gives none; both the sponge and the final dough are left to judgment. Reckon on somewhere around 2 to 3 cups of flour to the pint of milk for a thick sponge, and several cups more once the sugar, butter and eggs are worked in, until the dough is soft enough to handle but no longer sticky. The total will vary with the flour and is a matter of feel rather than a fixed figure.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Rolls this rich and sugared brown fast, so a moderate oven of about 375F suits them; a hotter oven risks darkening the tops before the centres are set.
- TimingsSponge until bubbly and domed, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Dough until doubled, about 1 hour. Shaped balls in the tin until puffed and touching, 30 to 45 minutes. Bake 20 to 25 minutes.
- The sweetened milk washMilk stirred with a spoonful of sugar, brushed on just before baking. It gives the glossy, slightly sticky top that distinguishes these from a plain roll, but it also accelerates browning, so watch the last five minutes.
- Arranged closelyCrowding is deliberate. The balls rise into each other and stay soft on the sides, pulling apart after baking. A 9x13 tin takes about two dozen balls of roughly 2 ounces each.
- ButterTwo heaping tablespoonfuls is about 2 ounces. Have it soft, not melted, so it works into the sponge without slackening the dough.
"Rusk" carries two meanings in old English-language cookbooks, and they pull in opposite directions. The older sense is a twice-baked bread, dried hard in a slow oven to keep at sea or to be soaked for invalids and infants -- the same idea as Dutch beschuit or German Zwieback. But in American household books of the later nineteenth century the word had drifted to mean a rich, sweet, milk-and-egg raised roll like this one, often baked crowded in a tin and glazed with sweetened milk, and only sometimes sliced and dried afterward. This recipe belongs to that second sense: a tea roll, begun as a sponge, the usual method where the sugar, butter and eggs would otherwise weigh down a slow-working yeast.