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Flour (Add yeast cakes to milk when)
1 Add yeast cakes to milk when lukewarm; then add salt and one cup flour, and let rise until very light. Add sugar, butter, eggs unbeaten, and flour enough to handle.
Shape as finger rolls, and place close together on a buttered sheet in parallel rows, two inches apart; let rise again and bake twenty minutes. When cold, cut diagonally in onehalf inch slices, and brown evenly in oven. 1 cup scalded milk
This is a sponge-method roll dough finished as rusks — baked, cooled, sliced and dried a second time in the oven. The ingredient list has been cut off at the first line, so treat the quantities below as the shape of the recipe rather than a transcription.
- The missing ingredientsOnly "1 cup scalded milk" survives from the list; the sugar, butter, eggs, salt, yeast and total flour are gone. A dough of this type would take something like 1 cup scalded milk, yeast, a little sugar and butter, egg, salt and flour enough to handle — but that is a guess rather than a documented set of proportions, and note that the recipe itself calls for "yeast cakes" in the plural.
- Yeast cakesA household compressed yeast cake of the period ran around 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast, though sizes varied. Dry yeast was also sold in cake form and worked more slowly; the recipe appears to assume the fresh compressed sort.
- Scalded milk, then lukewarmMilk was scalded to kill enzymes and wild organisms in an unpasteurised supply, and scalding still deactivates whey proteins that slacken a dough. Cool it to 100-110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast starts to suffer, which is why the instruction is emphatic.
- "Let rise until very light"The first stage is a sponge: milk, salt, yeast and one cup of flour only. It is ready when it is domed, bubbly and just beginning to fall, usually 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen.
- Eggs unbeatenThey go in whole alongside the butter and sugar rather than being beaten first; the wording simply spares the extra step.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Around 350F for the first twenty minutes will colour finger rolls of this size; the second, drying bake wants to be much cooler, around 275-300F, until the slices are dry through and evenly tan rather than browned at the edges.
- Placed close togetherThe rolls are set close together within each row so they touch as they rise, giving soft sides and a straight cut face, with the rows themselves two inches apart. That matters here: the slices must be flat enough to toast evenly.
- Cut when coldSlicing warm bread drags and tears. Cool completely, ideally several hours, before cutting the half-inch diagonals.
- Yield and keepingA one-cup-of-milk dough gives perhaps a dozen and a half to two dozen finger rolls, and several dozen rusks depending on how they are shaped and sliced. Once fully dried they keep for weeks in a tin — that was the point of the second baking.
What this recipe produces is zwieback — German for "twice baked", the same idea as Italian biscotti and French biscotte. Twice-baked bread is one of the oldest forms of food preservation in Europe, since driving the moisture out of an enriched roll turns a two-day loaf into something that keeps for weeks without refrigeration. By the time The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared, zwieback had a settled place in American domestic cookery as invalid and infant food: it was recommended for weak stomachs and teething children on the period's own reasoning that the second baking dextrinises the starch, making it easier to digest and giving it the faint sweetness a plain rusk has. The bread chapter of this book is unusually methodical about yeast, sponges and temperature, reflecting Fannie Farmer's insistence that baking be treated as measurable procedure rather than inherited knack, and a recipe like this one — sponge first, enrichment second, two separate bakes — shows that approach applied to a keeping bread.