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Common Rusk, Or Buns Without Eggs
4 pounds of light bread dough. 6 ounces of butter or lard, 8 ounces of sugar. 1 tablespoonful of cinnamon extract.
Take the dough at about noon and work in the other ingredients. Let stand an hour, then knead thoroughly. At 4 o'clock knead again, mould into round balls, grease between each one as you place them in the pans. Rise an hour, bake 20 minutes. Placed close together in the pans they are the ordinary sweet rusks. Set some distance apart they are round flat buns; may be sugared on top and have currants or carraway seeds mixed in the dough. The richer French varieties will be found further on.
A bakeshop formula that assumes you already have bread dough on hand: this is an enriching method rather than a scratch recipe. Everything hinges on working the fat and sugar into an already-risen dough and then giving it time to recover.
- The doughFour pounds of "light bread dough" means a plain risen white bread dough, roughly what you get from 2 1/4 lb (about 8 cups) flour with water, salt and yeast. Buy or make a lean dough and let it rise fully before you begin.
- The hinge: enriching a risen doughButter and sugar worked into a fermented dough slow the yeast, which may be why the recipe allows an hour's rest, a knead, and then a further three hours (about one o'clock to four) before shaping. Do not shorten it; the dough will feel slack and greasy at first and only comes together on the second knead.
- Cinnamon extractAn alcohol-based flavouring, less commonly stocked now than ground cinnamon. Ground cinnamon can stand in, but the strength of the period extract is not knowable, so add to taste; cinnamon oil is far more potent and needs only a few drops.
- FatSix ounces (1 1/2 sticks) of butter for 4 lb dough is a modest enrichment. Lard was the cheaper trade choice and gives a softer, less flavoured crumb; either works, but have it soft rather than melted so it distributes without greasing the dough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Twenty minutes for rolls of this size suggests a fairly hot oven, somewhere around 375 to 400F; judge by a deep colour and a hollow sound underneath rather than trusting the clock.
- Greasing between the ballsThis is deliberate, not incidental. Buns set close together with grease between them bake into a slab that pulls apart cleanly with soft sides, which is what makes them "rusks" in this book's sense.
- YieldFour pounds of dough plus enrichment gives roughly 24 to 30 buns at 2 1/2 oz each, or two full sheet pans.
- VariationsThe recipe says only that currants or caraway seeds are mixed in the dough, without specifying at which stage. Sugar on top is best applied to damp, freshly moulded tops so it sticks.
Rusk in the English and American baking trade covered two different things: the twice-baked dried bread still sold as rusk in Britain and as beschuit in the Netherlands, and the soft sweet roll described here, closer to what a modern reader would call a sweet bun. The recipe assumes dough already made and is timed against a working day -- take the dough at noon, shape at four, bake in the early evening -- which points to a trade rather than a domestic setting. The "without eggs" of the title may be a cost note as much as a description, eggs being the expensive enrichment, with the richer French sorts promised later in the book.