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Nine Eggs
Two ounces of Sugar.
One gill of warm Milk or Cream.
A good pinch of Salt.
Mix the salt and sugar with the warm milk or cream, put the flour on a slab, make a hole in the centre and mix in the butter warmed, the milk and the nine eggs. Work it lightly backwards and forwards to rub out all the lumps. Mix the sponge and the dough when thoroughly incorporated,* cover it over and set it in a cool place for twelve hours; then make it up and bake it in small moulds or in shapes like a penny loaf.
Bake it in a hot oven for about half an hour.
When it is ready for baking the paste will appear full of small globules of air, and be elastic to the touch.
This is a brioche in all but name, and the page assumes you already have the sponge and the flour weight from the preceding recipes in the section. Read it as a method rather than a complete formula.
- The list is incompleteSugar, milk and salt are given quantities, but the flour and the butter have no weight at all and the yeast sponge is only cross-referenced. Rich brioche pastes run anywhere from half to an equal weight of butter to flour, so the flour that nine eggs implies can only be guessed at. Treat any figure you settle on as a reconstruction.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a cup; in American usage 4 fl oz, half a cup. It should be warm rather than hot, no more than blood heat, or it risks killing the yeast in the sponge.
- The spongeA soft batter of a little of the flour, the yeast and warm liquid, left until it domes and smells alcoholic. It is best mixed into the egg-and-butter paste only once it is fully active.
- "A hot oven"Probably somewhere in the region of 425-450F by modern reckoning. Small moulds and penny-loaf shapes want that sort of heat to set the crust before the butter runs; the half hour given would suit a loaf of about a pound, and small moulds would likely be done sooner.
- The twelve hours in a cool placeThis is the hinge. Something like a cool larder rather than a warm kitchen; a modern refrigerator at 40F is slower but safer for a dough carrying nine eggs and a great deal of butter. The cold rest is not optional, it firms the butter so the dough can be shaped at all.
- Working the butter"Butter warmed" means softened to the texture of ointment, not melted. Melted butter will not emulsify into the eggs and the baked crumb turns greasy and dense.
- Reading the doughThe globules of air and the elastic feel described at the end are the proof test. If the chilled dough is still inert after shaping, give it a further hour at room temperature before it goes in.
- YieldImpossible to state, since the flour weight is missing; on any reconstruction, a small number of penny-loaf shapes or a batch of small moulds. Eat it the day it is baked, or toast it after.
The comparison to a "penny loaf" is telling: that was the small loaf of everyday commercial baking, sold for a penny, so the cook was being told to make something of roughly the size and shape of ordinary bread but out of a paste that cost many times as much. The method here -- sponge first, butter and eggs worked on a slab, then a long cold rest before shaping -- is essentially the French brioche procedure. Titles of this kind, naming a rich yeast paste by its egg count, point to a distinction between grades of paste, the more eggs the finer the crumb, though how widely that naming convention was used is not something this page can tell us.