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Old Fashioned Rusk
Sift twice together: 2 1/2 cups flour. 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon and soda. 1/2 teaspoon each salt, cloves and nutmeg. 1/2 cup butter creamed. 2 1-3 cups sugar (brown). 1 egg. 1 cup milk.
Blend these all well together, stir in last a cup of raisins or dates cut into strips, bake in a moderate oven using a deep loaf pan.
A spiced quick-bread loaf that reads more like a modern date-and-raisin tea bread than the twice-baked rusk of the name. The instructions are compressed to the point of shorthand, so a couple of things need pinning down before you start.
- The sugar quantity is suspectThe sugar quantity is worth questioning -- "2 1-3 cups sugar (brown)" against 2 1/2 cups flour is a great deal of sugar for a loaf of this size, and the printed fraction may be a misprint. Bakers may prefer to reduce it, but the figure as printed is what the book gives.
- Moderate oven350F. In a deep loaf pan the centre will need roughly 50 to 60 minutes; test with a skewer at the deepest point, since the fruit holds moisture and a loaf that looks done on top often is not.
- Soda without an obvious acidThe single teaspoon of soda relies largely on the acidity of the brown sugar's molasses. With modern light brown sugar the rise is weaker; if the loaf sits low, that is why, not your mixing.
- Order of work"Blend these all well together" is misleading. Cream the butter with the sugar, beat in the egg, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Overbeating once the flour is in gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Sift twice, and mean itThe double sifting is doing real work here: it distributes a teaspoon of soda and three separate spices evenly through the flour. Skipping it leaves bitter soda pockets.
- The fruitToss the raisins or cut dates in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in at the last moment, or they sink to the bottom of a deep pan.
- Pan and yieldThe book says only a deep loaf pan; a standard loaf tin, greased and lined at the base, suits the quantity. It cuts better the day after baking, once the crumb has set.
Rusk properly means bread or a sweet dough baked, sliced and returned to the oven to dry, a keeping-food often associated with ship's biscuit and still sold in that form for teething babies and for Dutch beschuit. The "old fashioned" here is doing the work of the name rather than the method: what Mrs. Wilson gives is a single-bake spiced loaf, part of the broad early twentieth-century drift of old bread names onto chemically leavened quick breads that could be mixed in one bowl and put straight in the oven. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal around the First World War, when domestic-science columns pushed exactly this kind of economical baking, and her recipes carry the habits of that work: brown sugar and dried fruit instead of a costly quantity of eggs and butter, spices to carry the flavour, and directions cut down to the fewest words the page would allow.