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Rusk (One pint milk three eggs one)
One pint milk, three eggs, one tea-cup each of butter and sugar, and one coffee-cup potato yeast; thicken with flour, and sponge over night; in the morning stir down, let rise, and stir down again; when it rises make into a loaf, and let rise again; then roll out like soda biscuit, cut and put in pans, and, when light, bake carefully. Or when baking take four cups dough, one-half cup butter, one cup sugar, three eggs; mix thoroughly, adding enough flour to mold easily; let rise, make into rather high and narrow biscuit, let rise again, rub the tops with a little sugar and water, then sprinkle over them dry sugar. Bake twenty minutes.
A sweet enriched dough raised overnight on a homemade potato ferment. The two versions are alternatives: build the dough from scratch, or enrich four cups of bread dough already rising on baking day.
- Potato yeastTypically a home-kept starter of boiled potato, sugar and flour, fed and reused. One coffee-cup of it is largely liquid, so substituting a packet of dry yeast (about 2 1/4 tsp) means adding roughly a cup of water or milk back to keep the dough soft; adjust by feel.
- Cup sizesIn cookbooks of this period a tea-cup is usually taken as about 3/4 cup and a coffee-cup as about a full cup. On that reading the first version is roughly 3/4 cup each butter and sugar to a pint of milk.
- "Thicken with flour"No flour quantity is given anywhere, and none can be honestly supplied: work to a soft dough that just clears the bowl, somewhere near 6 to 7 cups for a pint of milk, and adjust by feel.
- Sponge over nightThe overnight rise assumes an unheated kitchen, perhaps 60F. In a modern 70F room the sponge will be ready in far less time and can go slack and sour; refrigerate it overnight instead and let it come back to room temperature in the morning.
- The repeated stirring downKnocking the dough back twice before shaping helps refine the crumb, alongside the enrichment. Better not to skip a deflation to save time.
- Oven heatNot stated. "Bake carefully" for a sugar- and egg-rich dough means moderate, 350 to 375F; the twenty minutes given in the second version fits high, narrow biscuits at that heat. Sugared tops brown early, so watch the last five minutes.
- The sugar washIn the second version, rubbing the tops with sugar dissolved in a little water and then dusting with dry sugar gives a sweet, crackled crust. The recipe applies it after the final rise, just before the loaves go into the oven.
- YieldThe full first version makes roughly two to three dozen rusks depending on how thick you roll and cut. They stale quickly; other period recipes direct that rusk be split and dried in a slow oven to keep as hard rusk, though this one stops at the first baking.
Rusk in nineteenth-century American cookbooks means two related things: a sweet, milk-and-egg roll eaten fresh at tea, and the same roll split and dried to a hard, keeping biscuit, in the tradition of ship's twice-baked bread that gives us the words biscotti and zwieback. Its place in a book like this reflects a household where the bread crock was already working: the second method here simply borrows four cups of dough from the day's baking and enriches it. The potato yeast is the period marker. Before packaged yeast was reliably available, cooks maintained their own ferment on boiled potato and sugar, and a recipe that calls for a coffee-cup of it assumes a jar on the shelf being fed week to week. Community and church cookbooks, this one among them, are full of competing potato-yeast formulas because a household's bread was only as good as its starter.