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French Rusks
2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in
The text as printed here breaks off mid-line, so what survives is the sponge for a rich milk bread and nothing else. Read the notes below before deciding whether to attempt it from this page.
- The text is incompleteThe list ends at "1 yeast cake dissolved in" — the liquid for the yeast, the flour quantity, the shaping and the baking are all missing. Any flour figure given here would be invention; a rich milk dough of this kind generally takes somewhere in the region of 6 cups, but the original does not say.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is usually reckoned as roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast. Recipes of this type commonly dissolved it in about 1/4 cup lukewarm water, but the page breaks off before saying so.
- Scalded milkScalding raw milk was standard practice; it is generally explained as destroying components in raw milk that slacken dough, and it also made the milk keep. Pasteurised milk needs only to be warmed to blood heat, though scalding also melts the butter and dissolves the sugar in one step, which is convenient.
- Temperature of the mixtureTwo cups of scalded milk will kill yeast outright. Let the milk, butter, sugar and salt cool to about 110F before the dissolved yeast goes in.
- What a rusk actually isRusks are baked twice: shaped into small rounds or fingers, risen, baked through, then split or sliced and returned to a slow oven — about 300F — until dry, crisp and pale gold. The second bake is the whole point.
A rusk is bread baked twice, a preservation trick far older than any cookbook: driving the moisture out of a baked loaf makes something that will keep on a ship, in a knapsack, or in a nursery cupboard. The word is generally traced to Iberian rosca, a coil or twist of bread, though the derivation is uncertain, and by the nineteenth century it meant a small, sweetened, twice-baked roll eaten with tea, given to invalids, or soaked in milk for children and the toothless. "French" here is often said to signal richness rather than any French original — butter and sugar in the dough, the same logic that produced Zwieback in German kitchens and biscotti in Italian ones. Its presence in the Boston Cooking School book's bread chapter reflects a household economy in which enriched dough was worth the trouble precisely because the second baking made it last.