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Raised Graham Biscuit
Follow directions for Raised Biscuit, using one pint of graham bread dough.
RUSKS, No. I-Take two cups of sugar; one cup of yeast; one cup of butter; two eggs; one-half teaspoon of soda; one teaspoon of salted flour. At night scald the milk, and while it is cooling add the sugar and salt. When lukewarm, put in the yeast, and enough flour to make a thick batter; then cover and set in a warm place. In the morning work the butter into the dough, and add the eggs, well beaten, and the soda, dissolved in a little cold water. Add flour enough to admit of rolling the dough out with a rolling pin. Roll it one-half an inch thick, cut out the rusks with a biscuit cutter, place them in a buttered pan, and when risen to more than double the original size, brush over the tops with sugar dissolved in milk, and bake them thirty minutes in a moderate oven. RUSKS, No. 2-In two teacups of bread dough which has been raised over night, mix thoroughly one-half cup of soft butter, two tablespoons of sugar and one egg, adding a little flour. Let the dough rise until very light, roll it out on the molding board, cut into biscuits, and put into pans. Have the biscuits raised again by tea time and bake in a moderate oven. Care must be exercised to keep the dough at such a temperature that it will not sour.
Three linked recipes for enriched yeast doughs, written for a kitchen with a bread sponge already working. The ingredient lists are unreliable — milk is never listed but is essential, and "one teaspoon of salted flour" is almost certainly a printer's run-together of "one teaspoon of salt" and "flour" — so read the method, not the list.
- The graham biscuit is a cross-referenceThe first line is not a standalone recipe: it sends you to Raised Biscuit elsewhere in the breads chapter and tells you to substitute a pint of graham dough. Graham flour is coarse whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ, and a pint of risen dough is roughly a pound.
- A cup of yeast is not a packet"one cup of yeast" here means a cup of liquid yeast, homemade or shop-bought, of the pourable ferment kind commonly kept going in such kitchens (hop-and-potato yeasts were among the usual sorts). It contributes about a cup of liquid as well as the leavening. A rough modern equivalent is a mature liquid starter, or instant yeast with a cup of milk or water added to make up the missing liquid.
- The unlisted milkRusks No. 1 tells you to scald milk at night with no quantity given. Judge by consistency: enough scalded milk with the two cups of sugar and the yeast to make a thick batter with the flour, on the order of a pint. This is a genuine gap in the original, not something to convert precisely.
- Why scald at allScalding was done to kill off competing bacteria in unpasteurised milk and to deactivate whey proteins that slacken a dough. With pasteurised milk the food-safety reason is gone, but heating to about 180F still gives a stronger crumb. Cool it to blood heat before the yeast goes in or you will kill the culture.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350-375F. Thirty minutes at that heat suits rusks half an inch thick that have doubled; expect a pale gold, soft-crumbed result rather than a hard crust.
- The soda is for acidity, not liftThe soda is mainly for acidity -- Half a teaspoon of soda dissolved in cold water goes in with the butter and eggs to neutralise the sourness an overnight sponge develops; in reacting with that acid it also gives a little gas. That is also the point of the closing warning in Rusks No. 2 -- a dough kept too warm turns acid, and the result goes sharp and slack.
- The sugar washSugar dissolved in a little milk, brushed on before baking, gives a sticky matte glaze. The recipe has you apply it once the cut rusks have risen to more than double, just before the pan goes in; brush lightly, since handling risen dough can deflate it.
- Timing and yieldTiming -- Rusks No. 1 runs overnight for the sponge, then further working, rolling and proving in the morning. Rusks No. 2 is set to be ready by tea. The two are on very different scales -- No. 2 begins with only two teacups of dough -- so their yields are not comparable.
Rusks in an American household book of this period sit between bread and cake: an enriched, sweetened yeast dough, cut like a biscuit, often split and dried a second time in a slow oven to keep for weeks. The name is usually traced to the Spanish and Portuguese rosca, a twist or coil of bread, though the derivation is not certain. Butterick prints both a from-scratch version and a version that begins with dough already raised for the day's bread, which tells you how these books expected a kitchen to run: the sponge was standing anyway, and a cup or two of it diverted with butter, sugar and an egg turned supper bread into something for tea. The graham line at the top belongs to a different current — Sylvester Graham's campaign for unbolted whole-wheat flour, chiefly of the 1830s and 1840s, by this date thoroughly absorbed into ordinary domestic cooking as simply a wholemeal option offered alongside the white.