The rusk, an old idea that worked well for Mr. Heudebert, a bread lover and generous man

Charles Heudebert: the man who made the rusk famous (and vice versa)

In fact the rusk is a kind of sandwich bread in which we put a lot of very fine flour, up to 97%, yeast, sugar, vegetable matter, butter and skimmed milk all with some water. Baked a first time, the bread formed is then sliced ​​and baked a second time, it is “bis cooked”. The genius of the rusk is Charles Heudebert, a Frenchman born in 1872 whose name is so intimately linked to the rusk that we often believe him to be its inventor. In fact he is the one who made it popular when he started to manufacture it in industrial quantities from his factories in Nanterre.

Heudebert, passionate about bread and generous with our hairy people

And if we especially remember the rusk, we must not forget that Mr. Heudebert is at the origin of a lot of inventions around bread, for example what he calls “essential bread”, in fact the ancestor of diet bread, in which he had the idea of ​​adding casein. He also invented a variant called “the bread of the water towns” which was at the time served in spas. We especially owe him the condensed bread, a bread that can be kept for several years, hard as a rock unless it is soaked in water, on a principle quite similar to freeze-dried coffee. A bread chosen by the Ministry of War in 1910 and which will be the bread of the soldiers of 14 after Mr. Heudebert will have offered the patent to France. Rusks are delicious spread of course, you can even make pizza rusks. On the health side, the rusk is rich in slow sugars, casually it contains fiber, and provides protein. Cooking is a lot of ingredients, like rusks, but it’s also a lot of heart.