Buttermilk Rusks: Egte Karringmelkbeskuit

Buttermilk Rusks made with Yeast

Genealogy is fascinating; I was introduced to it by a Mormon neighbour of ours, who very kindly spent hours with me teaching me the rudiments and, most importantly, recommending which software package to download and to which sites I should subscribe (given a plethora of sites, and the expense, she recommended to work with a few, deplete their resources and only then to move on to the next). 

As a result, I have spent many stimulating hours over the last few years working out from whence all our ancestors came, which quest, on my side, was helped greatly by my maternal grandfather's memoirs, in which he touched, at what length he could, on his various ancestral lines. My father's Norwegian lines proved to have been wonderfully documented, and while my maternal grandmother's lines are obscured by poverty and orphanage, tracing this line proved less daunting than anticipated, thanks to the Scottish government's far-sighted plan of ensuring all their church records are digitised, which records I could then correlate with a tree hand-written into a Family Bible, which was recently given to my uncle, a keen documenter of the family. It's just the Irish that is proving particularly troublesome, whether it's the aristocratic Temples from which we are apparently related on the distaff side, but whose births were not recorded in the ordinary manner, or the very troublesome Doyles of County Wexford, the history is muddied and perplexing. And that's just my side.

The garden made by my great-great grandmother

In our children's case, given that my husband is Afrikaans-speaking, while I am an English-speaking South African, it is fascinating that these historical quirks have proved to be relatively minor in comparison to what we have in common from a countries of origin perspective. This appears to have translated into a cuisine that is more common than otherwise, which may be less interesting than it appears in that so much of my husband's more recent line is derived from a bunch of Scots Ministers who went to the Northern Cape, while my line too has Scots abounding, but courtesy of His Majesty's Army when Rule Brittanica was an all-too-crimson reality, and where escape from the decades of troubles of the early 1800s was made possible by means of enlisting in His Majesty's Army. It was from my grandmother that I learnt much of my cooking, albeit during a period when Women's Institute recipe books held deep sway over rural communities, and since my husband and I both have farming roots - denoted by our need to grow our own organic vegetables - we have more in common than otherwise. However, he can trace his roots right back to a birth in Cradock in 1792, predating my first antecedent's birth in the country by a half-century or so.

For those unaware of the dynamics of power in terms of an uncommon common history, the Anglo-Boer War has cast one of many long shadows over our land, even a century later, and my grandfather was greatly involved, albeit in a relatively minor manner, in politics - and liked nothing more than being a major heckler at Nationalist Party meetings. In his memoirs, he writes of having to learn to fend for himself and his younger brothers of whom he was greatly protective, even with fisticuffs on occasion, since since his family represented the hated Engelse (English) in an all-Afrikaans boarding school, not long after the end of the second Anglo-Boer War, in a small town to which his father was posted as Magistrate after the death of his mother.

My grandfather, Temple, with his four younger brothers

We grew up on my grandfather's stories, he was a raconteur of note, and were as such intimately acquainted with the vagaries of power and the grip of politics. In particular, given that KwaZulu-Natal was considered by many as the Last Outpost of the British Empire (though I have to say that given the many twilights of said Empire, there was many a former colony competing for the trophy), it was never a given that rapprochement between the former white tribes of South Africa would necessarily occur, and in fact, one of the many enterprises with which my grandfather occupied himself with, auto-didact that he was, was cumulatively working out the percentage of inter-language marriages that occurred in the 1940s and 50s between English and Afrikaans speakers (based on their surnames) over an extended period of time in the Johannesburg newspaper. His findings: it was much more likely for an English-speaking lass to marry an Afrikaner fellow than the other way around, but neither was particularly common. 

All this is a long and roundabout way of seguing into my new pièce de résistance as far as my husband is concerned: Buttermilk Rusks, a form of sweet bread, double-baked - or scarce baked and then dried out for a long time in a barely hot oven. My husband considers no work-place adequately stocked without a supply of said rusks from which provender he can provide breakfast or lunch for himself. However, from my perspective, I held out for almost a full decade against his wishes in this regard, supplying him instead with imported packages of Ouma Rusks, an iconic South African brand, when in the Middle East.

Why did I refuse to bake rusks? I don't know - call it wifely whims if you wish. Maybe it was the thought of competing with all these ancestral ghosts of strong, pioneering Afrikaner women that I found daunting, though I shouldn't have, after all, that's why my very dear friend, Lizette, recommended I should think of finding for myself a partner in an Afrikaner male - after all, she said, they LIKE their women to be strong and opinionated - and besides which, she explained, there was a particularly tall young male in our vicinity who she figured was especially partial to my specific brand of strong-minded opinion. So here we are, 11 years and 3 kids later:

"The full catastrophe" (Zorba the Greek)

Nonetheless, it took me a while to warm up to the concept that a few fat rusks dunked in sweet hot coffee make an adequate breakfast, and they were definitely not on my culinary agenda. However, Lizette recalled for me with great clarity and warmth her waking up every morning, making the tea and then helping her younger sisters to a breakfast of rusks, with a huge tin always bulging full with rusks, and that provided the impetus in this long journey into making our own. 

Now, if you are going to bake rusks at all, you should bake a lot, particularly given for how long you have to have them dry out in the oven - overnight is recommended by some. As a result, I usually make double the following mixture. At the same time, you want them to last you for a long time, and still remain fresh over an extended period of time. Now the old timers knew what they were doing in this regard, and baked with yeast. You can bake in quantity and it stores well, becoming really nicely hard and crunchy.

On the other hand, there are many who make their own rusks and tout their method as being "quick and easy" substituting baking powder as the rising agent; others mention using self-raising flour, which is really the same as the first, without your having to schlep around and find and then measure and add the baking powder. For those wishing to make a quick and easy buttermilk rusk recipe you can find it by clicking on the link. It is in Afrikaans, but if you ask Google Translate to translate it, it works just fine. 

I have made both types of rusks and, for me, there is a hands-down winner: the yeast rusks taste better and last longer. Rusks made only with baking powder taste - well, like baking powder and just don't last as well, becoming softer rather than harder as the months wear on. You're supposed to have to dunk a rusk in tea to eat it, it should be hard, not soft and crumbly, and I also do not appreciate the new-fangled recipes which add way too much sugar - the dough is not supposed to be sweet, the sweetness is supposed to come from the tea in which you dunk it. And finally, you just can't get a proper "crumb" without leavening. So, since I must make them, I'm doing them the proper way, with the full blessing I am sure of the shades of the past - after all, it is on rusks, biltong and coffee that the Afrikaners survived in the bushveld. And my husband now in the office. 

Buttermilk Rusk Recipe

20 grams dried yeast (2 dessertspoons / 4 teaspoons / 20 ml / 2 sachets)

95 grams sugar (½ cup)

726 grams buttermilk (3 cups)

230 grams melted butter (1 cup)

1.36 kg white bread flour (3 pounds) - preferably Eureka Mills stone-ground (or in US, All-Purpose Flour)

1 Tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 

Sift all dry ingredients together to ensure adequate dispersion throughout the mixture. Make a well in the centre for the wet ingredients, and, either mix by hand, working in circles from the centre out, or using the dough-hook of your mixer, mix all ingredients together. Knead lightly until the mixture comes together:

Buttermilk Rusk mixture, doubled, and placed in a bowl to rise

Place under a wet cloth, covered with a towel, until the mixture has risen to double the original volume.

The rusk mixture has now doubled in size

At this stage they say shape into balls. Well, there I was, asking my husband to come take photos and he said - "But that's not how you make bolletjies! (balls)". So I said, "Show me, then", and he did:

The traditional way of shaping rusks into large, regular 'bolletjies' (balls)

Shape into balls, then pack them tightly into a lightly greased baking pan (I use the left-over melted butter from the recipe to grease it). Leave to rise until doubled in size:

Buttermilk rusk dough doubled in size

Bake at 200C, gas mark 6, 400F for 20-30 minutes until just cooked. The bread should be a lovely light beige:

Buttermilk rusks dough hot and soft from the oven

My kids love to slather on butter at this stage and eat the soft, sweet bread straight from the oven. However, if it is rusks you are desirous of making, leave them to cool enough that you can break them into pieces - they will divide readily enough along the lines of the original balls and dry in a slow oven (100C) until it is as hard - as a rusk, actually.

What can I say but "Koek en Geniet?"