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Seven Eggs (Sieve the household flour into)
Sieve the household flour into a basin and make it into a soft dough with the milk, in which the yeast and sugar have been mixed as usual.
Put the Vienna flour into another basin, add the eggs and the butter, and beat all together with the hand. When the yeast has risen for about one hour, put the contents of the two basins together and beat until the mixtures are thoroughly incorporated (about twenty minutes). The dough must now rise for another hour. Make into large oval cakes, prove about fifteen minutes till the tops crack, and bake in a quick oven. with sugar and milk when half baked.
This is a rich Vienna-style dough built in two parts — a plain yeasted dough and a beaten egg-and-butter batter — brought together after the first rise. The method is sound; the proportions are what need attention.
- No quantities are givenThe instructions refer to "the milk", "the eggs", "the butter" and the two flours as though they had been listed. Only the seven eggs of the title survive, so the ratios have to come from a comparable enriched-bread formula rather than from this page.
- Two flours, two jobs"Household flour" is ordinary soft plain flour. "Vienna flour" was a high-grade flour milled from hard wheat, closer to today's strong white bread flour; it carries the gluten needed to hold seven eggs and a quantity of butter.
- Yeast "as usual"Presumably fresh compressed yeast creamed with a little sugar and slackened with milk at blood heat, about 98F. Instant dried yeast can be stirred straight into the flour instead, at roughly a third of the fresh weight.
- The twenty minutes of beatingCombining a slack egg-and-butter mixture with a risen dough demands real gluten development. A stand mixer with the dough hook does the same work in eight to ten minutes on medium; the dough should come away from the bowl in a sheet and pull to a translucent window.
- Butter temperatureThe butter must be soft enough to beat smoothly into the eggs but not oiled, or it will separate out during the final mixing and leave greasy streaks in the crumb.
- "Prove till the tops crack"Fifteen minutes is a guide, not a rule; in a cool kitchen a rich dough may want twenty-five to thirty. The fine crazing on the surface is the signal, and going much past it risks the loaves collapsing in the oven.
- A quick oven425 to 450F. Because of the egg and butter, watch the colour: if the tops darken before the centre sets, drop to 375F and cover loosely with foil.
- The half-baked washSugar dissolved in milk, brushed on partway through, gives the glossy lacquered top characteristic of Vienna goods. Apply it thinly or it burns.
Vienna bread was the great baking novelty of the later nineteenth century, its reputation made by the Austrian bakery at the 1867 Paris Exposition and spread through Britain by steam-injected ovens and imported Hungarian-milled flour. "Vienna flour" as a shop term meant that fine, strong, hard-wheat flour, and cookery writers of the period sometimes called for it alongside cheaper "household" flour, using the two in combination to get strength where it was needed without paying for the whole quantity. The split-dough method here — a plain yeast dough then beaten into a rich egg-and-butter mixture — might loosely be related to the older sponge-and-dough technique adapted to an enriched cake-bread, though it joins two complete mixtures rather than following that method strictly; such loaves sat somewhere between a breakfast bread and a teatime cake.