Rusk
Four eggs, two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, one pint of milk, three-fourths of a cup of yeast (or one compressed yeast cake). Beat eggs and sugar together and mix all soft with flour. Let them rise over night; mix again and when light, make into biscuit; put in tins and raise again before baking. When taken from the oven, rub the top with sugar and cream.
A rich overnight sweet yeast dough, closer to a brioche-ish tea bun than to the dry twice-baked rusk sold today. The recipe assumes you know what a workable dough feels like, since no flour quantity is given.
- Flour is undeclaredWith 1 pint milk, 4 eggs, and a cup of butter, expect roughly 7 to 8 cups (about 2 lb) of flour to reach a soft, kneadable dough. Add it gradually; "mix all soft" means keep the dough slack rather than stiff.
- Yeast conversionThree-quarters of a cup of old-style liquid yeast or one compressed cake is usually reckoned as roughly equivalent to about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast, if you find it, is sold today in 0.6 oz cakes, though period cakes varied in size.
- Scald and cool the milkThe recipe does not say to scald, though period recipes often did; more usefully here, milk at 100-110F is right for the yeast, and melted butter and beaten eggs should be no hotter. Much above 120F begins to weaken the rise.
- Overnight riseThe dough is meant to ferment cool and slow. A room around 65F overnight works; the refrigerator also works and gives better flavor, but let the dough come back to room temperature before shaping.
- "Make into biscuit"Biscuit here means a round bun, not a chemically leavened quick bread. Divide into pieces of about 2 1/2 oz, roll tight, and set them close together in greased pans so they rise upward and stay soft-sided.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes for buns of that size, until deep golden and 190F inside. Rich, sugary doughs brown early, so tent with foil if the tops darken before the centers set.
- The sugar-and-cream glazeRub the hot tops with cream and then sugar, or stir the two into a thin paste and brush it on; the heat of the buns dries it to a faint crackle. Do it straight from the oven or it will not take.
- YieldAbout two dozen buns. The dough is sweet enough to stale quickly; split and toast the leftovers.
"Rusk" originally meant bread baked, sliced, and returned to a slow oven until dry and hard, a keeping bread for ships and sickrooms; the word is generally traced into English from Spanish or Portuguese rosca, a twist or coil of bread, though the route is not certain. By the late nineteenth century many American home cookbooks applied the name to a rich, sweet, egg-and-butter yeast bun of exactly this kind, often glazed while hot, alongside the older dried sense. It rises on yeast, over the course of a night, at a period when baking powder was also in wide use for sweet baking.