Brioche
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 4 cups sifted flour 1 cup butter 8 eggs 1 teaspoonful salt YOU will find Brioche delightful to serve at your afternoon teas and coffees. It also answers as a tasty dessert. Brioche may be shaped in other ways than the twist described--for instance, in small balls or baked in little well-greased tins with ribbed edges.
Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk, add one cup of flour to make sponge. Beat well. Cover and set to rise in warm place, free from draught, until light--about three-quarters of an hour. To the rest of the flour add one tablespoonful sugar, butter softened, four eggs and salt. Beat all in well. Add sponge and beat again thoroughly; then the other four eggs, unbeaten, one at a time, beating thoroughly. Cover and let rise until light--about four hours--and beat again. Chill in refrigerator over night. In the morning shape by rolling under hand into long strips about twenty-seven inches long and three-fourths inch thick; bring ends together and twist like a rope. Form into rings, place on well-buttered pans to rise.
When double in size, glaze with white of egg diluted with water. Bake in a moderately hot oven fifteen minutes. Ice, while hot, with plain frosting. Spread with almonds.
A French enriched dough handled the American way: twisted into a ring, iced while hot and strewn with almonds. Nothing about it is quick, and the overnight chill is the step that makes the rest of it possible.
- The chill is not optionalA cup of butter and eight eggs worked into four cups of flour give something closer to a thick batter than to a dough. It becomes firm enough to roll under the hand only when cold. Take it from the refrigerator and shape it at once; as it warms it goes slack again and the strips will not hold a twist.
- Eggs one at a time, unbeatenFour eggs go in with the butter and flour. The other four are added singly after the sponge, each worked in before the next arrives. The mixture breaks each time and comes back together with beating — that is the process working, not failing. A stand mixer with the paddle handles it comfortably; by hand it is twenty minutes of real effort.
- Salt is low by current practiceOne teaspoon to four cups of flour is a little over one per cent of the flour weight, where a modern formula runs closer to two. Doubling it costs nothing and gives the dough a savor that the sugar alone will not supply.
- The twist, and the alternativeA strip twenty-seven inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick, folded in half and the two halves twisted together, makes the rope; joined end to end it becomes the ring. The booklet also allows small balls or fluted tins with ribbed edges, which is the shape most people now picture on hearing the word brioche. The ring is what this recipe actually intends.
- A moderately hot ovenThe booklet gives oven words rather than numbers. Moderately hot is conventionally read as somewhere around 375 to 400°F (190 to 200°C). Fifteen minutes suits rings of this size, but the egg-white glaze takes color well before the crumb is set, so judge by the ring rather than by the clock.
- The frosting is in this bookThe plain frosting called for has its own entry: confectioners’ sugar let down with milk or water and a quarter teaspoon of vanilla. Spread on a hot ring it soaks in and dries clear instead of sitting on the surface as a white coat.
Brioche belongs to the French tradition of enriched breads, and the booklet knows it carries French standing — but what it proposes is not the fluted mold and the topknot. It is a twisted ring, glazed with egg white, iced while still hot and scattered with almonds, which is the treatment an American kitchen of the period gave a coffee cake. The fluted tins appear only as an afterthought at the end of the headnote. Placing the thing at afternoon teas and coffees, and offering it as a dessert, says plainly what was being sold here: not a French breakfast, but a tea-table cake that happened to need the company’s yeast to exist.