Rusks
1 cup of yeast. 1 cup of sugar. 1 cup of cream. 4 eggs. Enough flour to make a batter, mixed with the other ingredients. Let it rise; then add enough flour to make rolls, and also add a teacup of lard and butter mixed. Bake as rolls after they have risen.--Mrs. H.
A sweet enriched dough built as a sponge, in the style of an 1870s Virginia household that kept its own liquid yeast. The measurements assume a wet barm rather than dry packaged yeast, which is the one thing worth translating carefully.
- "1 cup of yeast"This means a cup of liquid home yeast or barm, not concentrated modern yeast. The practical equivalent is about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast plus a cup of warm liquid (milk or water) to replace the lost moisture; using a full cup of any commercial yeast would be wildly out of range.
- CreamCream skimmed by hand from raw milk varied a good deal in richness, and was often thinner than modern heavy cream. Half heavy cream and half whole milk is a reasonable stand-in; you may scald and cool it if you like.
- A teacup of lard and butterA teacup is an unfixed measure in books of this period, reckoned anywhere from about half a cup to three-quarters; something in the region of 4 to 6 oz of fat, half lard and half butter, is a fair reading. Have it soft, not melted, and work it in after the sponge has risen as directed.
- The sponge stageMaking a loose batter first and letting it rise is the hinge of the recipe. Give it until it is bubbly and domed, an hour or more at warm room temperature, before the fat and the rest of the flour go in; adding rich fat too early slows the yeast badly.
- Flour quantityNo amount is given because it depended on the cook's flour. Expect somewhere near 5 to 6 cups total across both additions, stopping at a soft dough that is just past sticky. Softer dough gives the tender crumb these were prized for.
- Second rise and ovenShape into rolls and let them rise until nearly doubled. The recipe gives no oven direction at all; in a modern oven, 375-400F for 15 to 20 minutes until well browned works. The sugar and cream mean they colour faster than plain bread rolls.
- YieldAbout two dozen rolls of ordinary dinner size. They stale quickly, and rusks of this kind were sometimes split and dried out again in a cooling oven, in keeping with the older twice-baked sense of the word.
Rusk originally meant twice-baked bread, hard dry biscuit for keeping and for ships' stores, but by the middle of the nineteenth century American cooks had shifted the word toward a sweet raised roll made with eggs, sugar and cream, sometimes dried a second time and sometimes not. This version comes from Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), a book assembled from the contributions of many Virginia housewives, which is why it carries the signature "Mrs. H." rather than a fixed formula. The vagueness about flour is often said to be characteristic of the genre: contributors were writing for readers who had learned dough by feel.