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Rusks (Make them just before dinner)
Make them just before dinner - if kept they lose their crispness. ½ lb. flour, ½ lb. fresh butter, ½ lb. castor sugar, 4 eggs. Warm the butter, then add the sugar; stir for about 5 minutes, then add by degrees the flour and the eggs. Stir for another 10 minutes. Spread on a buttered baking sheet, then cover the top of the pastry with unblanched, sweet Jordan almonds, and bake in a moderate oven.
When done, cut in strips about 3 inches long, and 1 or ½ wide, and dry them in entrance to oven; this gives the almonds a parched taste. The rusks should be as thick as breakfast toast. They are very sweet. Ginger Rusks. 3/4 lb. of flour, 3/4 lb. castor sugar, 4 eggs, and about ½ OZ. powdered ginger; beat the yolks and whites separately, then beat in the sugar and the ginger, and add the flour. Bake in a quick oven on floured tins.
Sweet Rusks. (Hirschspieg'l Inn, Tyrol.) Take 3 whole eggs in their shells, weigh them; you will want their full weight in white sugar, and the weight of 2 eggs in flour, but keep all separate. Beat the whites to a stiff froth; have the yolks in another basin, stir only one way, and add the sugar. Mix thoroughly, and then add the stiff white froth, and lastly add the flour; mix well but lightly. Do not beat the flour in or the rusks will be heavy. Flavour with lemon peel or vanilla - the Germans use a little scraped cloves and cinnamon. (If you use a pod of vanilla, pound it with a little sugar.) Press through a paper funnel 1½ tablespoonfuls at a time on to a buttered baking sheet in strips the length of your finger.
Spread the mixture out thin - each should look like a "lady's finger" sponge biscuit crushed out flat. Bake in a quick oven for 3 minutes to make them crisp, by which time they should be a nice light brown. Leave oven door open. Glaze the tops if you like with egg. They may require 15 or 20 minutes to dry off all depends on the heat of the oven. Dry them on a sieve in the top of the screen to keep crisp till served. Their crispness is their merit. Serve them with a cream shape. Lady Clark prefers them unglazed.
Three separate rusk recipes run together under one heading: a rich almond-topped slab, a ginger sponge finger, and a light Tyrolean biscuit measured against the weight of its own eggs. All three are twice-baked, and the second bake is what the recipes are actually about.
- The hinge: the drying, not the bakingThe first and third recipes are baked, then dried: cut into strips and returned to a slack oven with the door propped ajar until they are dry through and snap cleanly. Lady Clark's "entrance to oven" and "top of the screen" both mean a warm, dry, draughty spot; a very low oven with the door cracked is the nearest modern equivalent. Skip this and you have cake.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is 350F for the almond rusks. A quick oven is 425-450F for the ginger and Tyrolean versions, though the "3 minutes" for the piped Tyrolean strips assumes they are spread paper-thin; check at 5 minutes for light brown.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, not confectioners'. Granulated pulsed briefly in a food processor works. Ordinary granulated will give a grittier, less even crumb in the creamed almond version.
- Jordan almondsIn this period the term means large, flat, sweet almonds, historically the fine Spanish or Malaga sort, sold shelled but with the skin on. It does not mean the pastel sugar-coated confection sold under that name now. Use whole unblanched almonds, as the recipe specifies; Lady Clark attributes the "parched" taste to the drying.
- Weighing eggsThe Tyrolean method is sound and worth keeping: three eggs in the shell weigh roughly 6 oz, so you need about 6 oz sugar and 4 oz flour. Weigh your own eggs rather than trusting the average.
- That half-ounce of gingerHalf an ounce of ground ginger to 12 oz of flour is roughly two and a half tablespoons, which is fierce by modern palates. There is no particular reason to read it as a misprint, but 1 to 2 teaspoons will read as a well-gingered biscuit to most people.
- Paper funnelA piping bag with a plain wide tip. The instruction to spread the mixture out thin matters more than the shape; these are meant to bake and dry quickly, not to rise like sponge fingers.
- Yield and keepingThe first recipe uses 3 lb of flour and sugar between them and makes a large quantity, cut into strips of 3 inches by 1 or 1 1/2. Lady Clark's headnote is emphatic that they lose their crispness if kept, and the third recipe likewise says "their crispness is their merit"; thorough drying is what gives them any keeping quality at all.
Rusk is the English form of a word generally traced back through Spanish and Portuguese rosca, a coil or twist of bread, and it came to mean any bread or cake baked twice so that it would keep dry and crisp: the same principle as Italian biscotti and German zwieback. What Lady Clark records here are three sweet biscuits that keep the twice-baked technique while abandoning the yeast dough entirely. The attribution of the third to the Hirschspieg'l Inn in the Tyrol is characteristic of the book: Lady Clark, wife of the diplomat Sir John Forbes Clark of Tillypronie in Aberdeenshire, collected recipes throughout her life from cooks, friends, hotels and inns across Britain and the Continent, jotting them down with their sources attached. Her notes were compiled and published after her death, which is why the entries keep the loose, spoken quality of a working notebook, complete with her own verdict on whether the rusks are better glazed.