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Rusks (Milk enough with one-half cup)
Milk enough with one-half cup of yeast to make a pint ; make a sponge and rise; then add one and a-half cups of white sugar, three eggs, one-half cup of butter; spice to your taste; mould, then put in pan to rise. When baked, cover the tops with sugar dissolved in milk.
A sweet enriched yeast bun in the old American sense of "rusk" — soft rolls, sometimes dried afterwards — with the flour quantity left entirely to the cook's judgement, as was normal in 1876.
- The half cup of yeastThis is liquid yeast: homemade barm or a similar household liquid yeast, not dry granules. A rough working equivalent is about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast, with the missing liquid made up in milk so you still have a pint.
- No flour is givenThe sponge is built to a pourable batter consistency, then flour is worked in after the eggs and butter until the dough is soft but mouldable. Expect somewhere in the region of 5 to 6 cups of flour for a pint of milk, added by feel rather than measure.
- Making the spongeWarm the milk to blood heat, stir in the yeast and enough flour for a thick batter, and let it rise until domed and bubbly — an hour or two at room temperature. This first stage does most of the flavour work in a dough this sweet and rich.
- Sugar slows the riseOne and a half cups of sugar against a pint of milk is a heavy enrichment. The second rise, after moulding, will take considerably longer than a plain bread dough — allow an hour and a half to two hours, and judge by the dough's puffiness rather than the clock.
- Spice to your tasteFor rusks of this period that generally meant nutmeg, mace or cinnamon, sometimes a little rosewater. A teaspoon of grated nutmeg is a fair starting point for this quantity.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake enriched sweet rolls at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until well browned and reading about 190F inside.
- The milk-and-sugar glazeBrush the tops the moment the rusks leave the oven, while they are hot enough to dry the glaze to a thin shine. A few tablespoons of milk stirred with sugar until dissolved is all that is meant — not an icing.
- YieldRoughly two dozen rolls the size of a small fist, in two pans.
"Rusk" now usually means a hard, twice-baked slice — split and returned to a cooling oven until dry, which made them keep for weeks and suited them to invalids, teething children and travellers. But in nineteenth-century American cookbooks the word covers the soft sweet roll as well, and the two uses sit side by side without comment. The recipe's vagueness is typical of The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1876), which was assembled from contributions by named local women and printed largely as they wrote it: a cook who had made rusks before needed to be told the proportions of milk, sugar, eggs and butter, and could be trusted to know how much flour a sponge would take. The half cup of yeast is the clearest date-stamp — packaged yeast was only beginning to reach American households in the 1870s, and many a kitchen still kept a liquid barm going, or begged one from a neighbour, and measured it by the cupful.