Egg Rusks
Melt three ounces of butter in a pint of milk. Beat six eggs into one-fourth of a pound of sugar. Mix these ingredients with enough flour to make a batter, adding a gill of yeast and half a teaspoonful of salt. When light, add flour to make a dough stiff enough to mould. Make into small cakes and let them rise in a warm place while the oven is heating.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A rich, sweet yeast dough of the kind that sits between a dinner roll and a brioche. The original assumes you keep liquid yeast on hand and can judge flour by feel, so the two things to settle before starting are the leaven and the oven.
- The gill of yeastA gill is half a cup, and here it means liquid homemade barm or a shop-bought yeast "cake" dissolved in water — mostly water by volume. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast and hold back about 1/3 cup of the milk to keep the hydration right.
- Weights in modern termsThree ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons; a quarter pound of sugar is about half a cup plus two tablespoons; a pint of milk is 2 cups. Expect to need roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour in total across the two additions.
- Milk temperature is the hingeButter melted in a pint of milk will be well above what yeast survives. Let the mixture cool to about 110F before the yeast goes in, or the rusks will never rise no matter how long they sit.
- Two-stage doughThe first mixing is a deliberately loose batter — a sponge. Let it double and go visibly bubbly, an hour or so, before beating in the rest of the flour. The sponge stage adds flavour as well as lift.
- Eggs and sugar19th-century eggs tended to run smaller than modern large ones, so five large eggs is a reasonable substitute for six. Beating them with the sugar until pale and thick disperses the sugar and lightens the crumb.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and a rusk sounds hollow when tapped underneath. A wash of beaten egg or milk before baking gives a glossy top.
- Second rise"While the oven is heating" would have meant a substantial wait with a wood range, though the time varied. Give the shaped cakes 45 minutes to an hour in a warm spot, until puffed and slack to the touch; this dough is heavy with butter and egg and rises slowly.
- YieldAbout 24 small rusks from a 2-inch piece of dough each. They stale quickly — best the day they are baked, or split and toasted after.
"Rusk" now usually means bread twice-baked to dryness, but in 19th-century American cookbooks it often meant this: a soft, sweet, egg-and-butter yeast cake. The word is generally traced through English from Iberian rosca, a coil or twist of bread, and the older sense of a keeping bread survives in the habit of splitting leftover rusks and drying them in a cooling oven. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives and their neighbours, which is why this one carries the signature "Mrs. Dr. S." — the recipe is a transcription of one woman's working practice, not an editor's tested formula, and the vagueness about flour quantity and oven heat is exactly what you would expect from a cook writing for others who already knew how a raised dough should feel.