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Zwieback
2 eggs 1/4 cup melted lard 2¾ cups sifted flour 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add three fourths of a cup of flour and beat thoroughly. Cover and set aside in a moderately warm place to rise for fifty minutes. Add lard (or butter), eggs well beaten, enough flour to make a dough-about two cups and salt. Knead; shape into two rolls one and one half inches thick, and fifteen inches long. Protect from draft and let rise until light, which should be in about one and one half hours. Bake twelve minutes in a hot oven. When cool cut diagonally into half-inch slices. Place on baking sheet and brown in a moderate oven.
A straightforward enriched yeast roll, baked twice so it dries into hard rusks that keep for weeks. The second bake is the whole point, and it is the step most likely to be rushed.
- YeastThe method calls for yeast dissolved in the scalded-and-cooled milk, though no amount is stated in the ingredient line. One packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, or one cake of compressed yeast, suits this quantity of flour.
- Flour quantityRead the flour as 2 3/4 cups sifted, which matches the method: three-quarters of a cup into the sponge, about two cups worked in afterward.
- Milk temperatureScalding is no longer necessary with pasteurized milk, but the cooling instruction still matters. The milk must be lukewarm, around 105-110F, before the yeast goes in.
- Oven temperaturesA hot oven for the first bake is roughly 400-425F; 'moderate' in books of this period usually means about 350-375F, and the low end of that range, or a little below, suits drying the slices. The rolls should be baked through and lightly colored, not dark, since they get a second heating.
- The second bakeThe recipe sets no time for the drying bake, and a few minutes will not dry the slices through. Turn them once and give them 20-30 minutes at around 325F, until they are crisp all the way to the center and snap rather than bend. Any moisture left inside will make them go soft and eventually moldy in storage.
- Cooling before slicingLet the rolls cool completely, ideally several hours or overnight, before cutting. Warm dough tears and crumbles under the knife; a serrated blade and a firm cold loaf give clean half-inch slices.
- LardQuarter cup of melted lard is about 55 g. Butter, as the recipe allows, gives a richer flavor and is the usual modern choice.
- YieldTwo 15-inch rolls cut diagonally into half-inch slices give roughly 40-60 rusks, depending on the angle of the cut. Stored airtight once fully cooled, they keep for a month or more.
Zwieback is German for "twice baked," the same idea that gives Italian biscotti and French biscuit their names. Drying bread a second time was originally a preservation technique, producing rusks that could be carried on ships or held in a pantry through the winter without staling, and the enriched, lightly sweetened version became a standard nursery and invalid food in nineteenth-century Europe. By the early twentieth century commercial zwieback was sold specifically for teething infants and convalescents, and general household cookbooks of the period commonly carry a recipe for it alongside their breads.