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Rusks (Eggless)
1 pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound butter ¼ pint boiling water 2 teaspoons baking powder Slice the butter into the boiling water. Mix ingredients. Bake a nice brown.
Take from oven, split open and then return to the oven to harden.
A terse contributor's recipe with an ingredient list that has clearly been jumbled in typesetting — the milk appears after the method. Read it as a plain enriched dough, baked as rolls and then dried out into rusks.
- The stray pint of milkThe milk is listed last, after the instructions, but it belongs with the other ingredients — a pound of flour cannot be brought together with a quarter pint of water alone. Note that an Imperial pint in a Canadian book of this vintage is 20 fl oz; adding all of it to a pound of flour gives a batter, not a dough, so add it gradually and stop at a soft, kneadable consistency.
- Weights into cupsOne pound of flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups scooped and levelled; a quarter pound of butter is one US stick, half a cup. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the liquid balance is already uncertain.
- A quarter pint of boiling waterFive fl oz Imperial, about 4¾ US fl oz, a little under two-thirds of a US cup. Its job is to melt the sliced butter before it meets the flour, so combine those two first and let the mixture cool to lukewarm before adding milk and baking powder.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to a pound of flour is a light hand by modern standards — around three to four teaspoons is now usual for a quick dough of this size. Baking powders of the period were generally single-acting and variable in strength, and the eggless dough is meant to be firm rather than airy.
- Oven for the first bake"Bake a nice brown" specifies no temperature; the book gives none. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, for 15 to 20 minutes suits rolls the size of a small fist.
- The second bake is the whole pointAfter splitting, return the halves cut side up to a much cooler oven — 250 to 300F — for 30 to 45 minutes, until they are dry through and crisp rather than merely browner. Rusks that are still soft at the centre will go leathery and mould within days.
- Shaping, which the recipe omitsDivide the dough into 12 to 16 pieces, roll into balls and set them close together on a tray so they join as they rise; the joined sides pull apart cleanly for splitting.
- Yield and keepingAbout a dozen to sixteen rusks. Once fully dried they keep several weeks in a tin, which is exactly why the second baking existed.
A rusk is bread baked twice — the same idea as zwieback, biscotti and ship's biscuit — and the second baking drives out enough moisture that the bread keeps for weeks without spoiling. That made rusks standard provision for travel, for the sick room, and for teething infants, who were given them to gnaw. This one is marked "eggless," a label that recurs through the Five Roses Cook Book: the book was assembled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal from recipes sent in by Canadian women using its flour, and eggs were a seasonal, sometimes scarce farm commodity rather than a year-round staple. The compressed, half-punctuated style and the misplaced pint of milk are typical of the volume, which reproduced contributors' notes with a light editorial hand and assumed a reader who already knew what a dough should feel like.