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Rusks (Yeast Recipe)
1 pint milk. 2 tablespoons yeast 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2 teaspoons salt Five Roses flour.
Prepare a sponge of yeast, milk and flour sufficient to make a thin batter, and let rise overnight.
Next morning, add eggs, butter, salt and sugar. Mix well together. Add flour enough to make soft dough. Shape into neat balls of equal size. Place in a pan and allow to rise until very light before baking.
Rusks require a long time for raising.
A sweet overnight yeast dough with the quantities stated loosely, as was normal in a flour-company book that assumed the cook already knew the shape of a bun dough. The milk and flour are left to judgment.
- The missing measurementsNo quantity is given for milk or flour. Work from about 2 cups of lukewarm milk beaten with roughly 2 cups of flour for the overnight sponge, then add flour in the morning until the dough is soft but no longer sticks to the hand — somewhere around 5 to 6 cups total. Add flour sparingly; a slack dough gives a lighter rusk.
- Two tablespoons of yeastMeasured by volume, so most likely a crumbled cake, roughly the equivalent of a 0.6 oz compressed cake; dry yeast cakes were also in common domestic use at this date. Two teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast will do the same work over a long overnight rise.
- Butter and sugarIt is easier to cream the softened butter with the sugar before adding it to the risen sponge, and to beat the eggs in one at a time. Cold butter added straight to the batter tends to leave streaks.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none, and no oven term is supplied. For a modern oven, about 375F for 15 to 20 minutes suits balls the size of a large egg, until the tops are deep gold. Sugar and egg brown faster than plain bread dough, so watch the last five minutes.
- "Require a long time for raising"This is the hinge. Sugar, fat and egg all slow yeast down, and the shaped balls may take 1½ to 2 hours to become genuinely light. Rushing the second rise gives a dense, bready crumb.
- The overnight spongeSet it in a cool room, not a warm one. A modern kitchen at 70F or more will carry the sponge past its peak by morning and leave it sour and slack; 60 to 65F suits it better.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 buns, depending on how much flour the dough takes. They are best the day they are baked.
A rusk in North American home baking of this period meant two related things: a rich, sweet, egg-and-butter yeast bun of the kind given here, and the same bun sliced and dried in a slow oven until crisp -- the older sense of the word, probably from Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a twist or coil of bread, though the derivation is not certain; the type is a cousin to ship's biscuit and to zwieback. Dried rusks kept well, which mattered in households that baked once or twice a week, and they were commonly given as nursery and invalid food, soaked in milk or broth. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and assembled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which may account for the shorthand here.