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Anisette Rusks
8 ounces of granulated sugar. 10 eggs. 4 ounces of almonds. 6 ounces of flour. A quarter ounce of anise seed.
Mince the almonds as fine as possible, and without taking off the skins. Mix them and the anise seed with the flour dry. Then beat the sugar and eggs quite light, as for sponge cake, and lightly stir in the flour, etc. Bake in long and narrow moulds and when a day old slice, and brown the slices on both sides in the oven.
This is a sponge-batter biscotti: a light egg foam baked as loaves, rested, sliced and dried. Everything depends on not deflating the foam and on giving the loaves their full day before you cut them.
- Weights, not cups8 oz sugar is about 1 1/8 cups, 6 oz flour about 1 1/3 cups, 4 oz almonds about 3/4 cup. The flour-to-egg ratio is deliberately low, so weigh rather than scoop.It is a foam held together by very little starch.
- Beat "quite light"Whip whole eggs and sugar over gentle warmth or in a stand mixer until they triple and fall in a thick ribbon, five to eight minutes. This is the only leavening in the recipe; there is no soda or powder.
- Fold, do not stirSift the flour, almonds and anise over the foam in three additions and fold with a spatula. Once the flour is worked in hard, the batter collapses and the rusks bake dense.
- Anise seedA quarter ounce is roughly a tablespoon of whole seed. Crush it lightly in a mortar to release the oil, but leave it visible, and use anise seed rather than star anise or fennel.
- Almonds with skins onThe skins are wanted for colour and flavour. Chop by hand or pulse very briefly; a food processor run long will turn unblanched almonds to paste and oil the batter.
- "Long and narrow moulds"Two loaf pans about 3 inches wide, or paper-lined channels of that width, so the finished slices are the classic short rusk shape. Bake at 350F for roughly 25 to 30 minutes, until the top springs back.
- The second bakeThe day of resting is what lets you cut clean slices from so tender a crumb. Slice about 1/2 inch thick with a serrated knife, lay flat on sheets, and dry at 300F, turning once, until pale gold and crisp through, 10 to 15 minutes a side.
- YieldTwo narrow loaves give roughly 40 to 50 slices. Fully dried, they keep for weeks in a tin.
A rusk is bread or cake baked twice, from the same impulse that produced Italian biscotti and German Zwieback -- the second bake drives off moisture so the slices keep far longer, which mattered in households without airtight storage. Anise was a common aromatic for dry keeping-cakes in Europe. The spelling "anisette" here points to the flavour rather than the liqueur of that name; no spirit goes into the batter. Note too what the recipe leaves out: no butter, no chemical leavening, no salt, just eggs beaten to the ribbon, which is how sponge work was done before baking powder became universal.