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Rusks (Bread Dough)
2 cups raised dough 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter 2 eggs (well-beaten) Five Roses flour.
Mix with enough flour to make stiff dough. Set to rise. When light, mould to high biscuit and let rise again. Add currants. Cover top with moistened sugar and cinnamon. Bake 20 minutes.
A sweet enriched bun built on a piece of ordinary bread dough — the old sponge-and-dough shortcut for bakers who already had a batch rising. The recipe assumes knowledge the modern cook has to supply, chiefly an oven temperature and the point at which the currants go in.
- Add the currants with the flour, not after shapingAs written the currants appear after the second rise, which cannot be done without deflating the buns. Work them in when you mix the stiff dough — about ½ to ¾ cup for this quantity.
- "2 cups raised dough"A piece of plain, fully risen white bread dough, somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound. Any lean bread dough works; the sugar, butter and eggs here are what turn it into a rusk dough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Sweet enriched buns of this size want a moderate oven, 375F; the sugar in the dough and on top will colour well before the centre sets at anything hotter.
- "Mould to high biscuit"Shape into tall, tight rounds about 2 inches across rather than flat discs — they should climb rather than spread. Set them close on the pan so they support each other as they rise.
- Five Roses flourA hard Canadian spring wheat flour from the Lake of the Woods mills, closer to modern bread flour than to all-purpose. Bread flour gives the structure this heavily sugared, buttered dough needs.
- Moistened sugar and cinnamonSugar mixed with cinnamon and dampened with a little water, patted onto the tops before baking so that it sets as a sugary crust rather than dissolving into the dough.
- Rising timesThe recipe says only "set to rise" and "when light." Expect 1½ to 2 hours for the first rise and 45 to 60 minutes for the shaped buns — sugar and butter both slow yeast considerably.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 buns. They are best the day they are baked; the sugar keeps them soft for a day or two after.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour, one of the most widely circulated cookbooks in early twentieth-century Canada. Recipes like this one show what a household kitchen looked like when bread was made weekly rather than bought: rather than starting fresh, the cook broke off a portion of the day's risen dough and enriched it with sugar, butter and egg. The word rusk originally meant a bread twice baked into a hard, keeping biscuit — the sense preserved in Dutch beschuit and in ship's rusk — while in North American cookbooks of the nineteenth century the name is often attached instead to a soft sweet raised bun of this kind, sugared on top.