South Africa's buttermilk rusks, a rich sweet dough baked as a slab, torn into fingers, and dried overnight in a cooling oven until hard enough to keep for months
Origin: The Swartland and the Overberg, Western Cape, South Africa
From the journey of Wheat.
Beskuit is the most eaten baked good in South Africa and it is almost unknown outside it. A rich buttermilk dough is baked as a solid slab, broken while warm into rough fingers, and then returned to a barely warm oven overnight until every trace of moisture has gone. What comes out is hard enough to crack a tooth and keeps for months in a tin, and it is eaten dunked in coffee or tea at any hour, most traditionally at first light. It is a preserving technology rather than a biscuit. The word descends through Dutch beschuit from the same Latin bis coctus, twice cooked, that gives English biscuit, and the practice came to the Cape with the Dutch East India Company, whose ships needed bread that would survive months at sea. It became the food of the interior: the Voortrekker wagon, the farm kitchen, and the long drive still run on it. The wheat is local and the region is specific. The Swartland, the rolling dryland country north of Cape Town, and the Overberg behind the mountains to the south-east grow the great majority of South African wheat, and they have done since the Cape became a commercial grain producer under British administration in the nineteenth century. The Dutch had sown wheat from 1652 to provision passing ships, but it was the nineteenth-century expansion that made the Cape a granary rather than a garden. Every household has its own version. Buttermilk is near universal, aniseed appears in the older Cape recipes, and modern versions run to bran, seeds, and muesli, but the shape is fixed: a slab, torn rather than cut, so that the rough surfaces catch the coffee.
The drying is the recipe. Under-dried rusks are the single most common failure and they spoil quickly. Buttermilk can be replaced with plain yoghurt let down with milk, or with milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice. Mosbolletjies, the Cape Dutch bun leavened with grape must, is dried in exactly the same way to make mosbolletjiebeskuit, which is the most prized rusk of all. For a modern seeded version, replace 200 g of the flour with a mixture of bran, sunflower seeds, and rolled oats.
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