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Rusks
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
To one tumbler of warm milk add a half gill of yeast three eggs and a coffeecup of sugar beaten together, two ounces of butter rubbed into flour, of which use only enough to enable you to mould it; let it rise over night; when very light, roll and put on tins to rise again, after which bake in a quick oven twenty minutes.
A sweet overnight yeast dough written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what the dough should feel like. The flour is deliberately unmeasured, so the judgement is yours.
- Tumbler and coffeecupA tumbler is about 8 fl oz, so one cup of warm milk. A coffeecup in this period runs smaller than a modern mug, roughly 6 to 8 oz; take it as a scant cup of sugar, and less if you want a roll rather than a bun.
- Half gill of yeastA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup of liquid yeast — homemade barm or a bought compressed-yeast slurry, both far weaker than what you can buy now. Two teaspoons of instant yeast is the working equivalent, and you may need to add a splash more milk to compensate for the lost liquid.
- Flour is the cook's call"Only enough to enable you to mould it" means a soft, slightly tacky enriched dough — expect somewhere between 4 and 5 cups. Err on the slack side; a stiff dough here bakes dry and heavy.
- A quick ovenGenerally reckoned somewhere around 400 to 450F; the book gives no temperatures. Twenty minutes is about the outside limit for rolls of ordinary size; start checking at twelve to fifteen minutes and pull them when the tops are deep gold.
- The overnight riseWith modern yeast a room-temperature overnight rise will overproof and go sour. Let the dough rise in the refrigerator instead, then bring it back to room temperature before rolling and shaping.
- What a rusk means hereIn American household books of this date, rusk often means a sweet raised roll rather than the twice-baked dry biscuit the word usually carries in Britain, though twice-baked versions appear as well. If you want the dry version, split and slow-bake the finished rolls afterwards.
- Butter and eggsTwo ounces is half a stick, rubbed into the flour as for pastry rather than creamed. Eggs of the period were often smaller than today's large; three medium is a reasonable reading.
- YieldRoughly two dozen rolls of about two inches. Best the day they are baked; they stale quickly, which is precisely why the twice-baked treatment existed.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the great wave of North American community cookbooks compiled from members' contributions and sold for charity, which is why this entry carries a contributor's name rather than a house voice — Mrs. P. B. Ayer wrote down what she did, not what a stranger would need. The recipe assumes a household keeping its own yeast, since reliable commercial compressed yeast was only beginning to reach ordinary kitchens in the 1870s and 1880s; the half gill of liquid leaven and the long overnight rise are both marks of that older practice. The word rusk itself is generally traced, though not with certainty, to the Spanish and Portuguese rosca, a twisted or ring-shaped roll, and in English it drifted over centuries toward meaning a bread baked hard for keeping — ship's provisions, invalid food, teething biscuits. The earlier sense of a rich, sweet raised roll is what is being made here.