Citron Buns
1 yeast cake 6 tablespoonfuls sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful raisins 1/4 cupful chopped citron peel 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1 cupful scalded milk 1 egg 5 1/2 cupfuls flour 1/4 cupful lukewarm water 1 teaspoonful salt Scald milk, add half of sugar and salt; when lukewarm add yeast dissolved in water and 1 1/2 cupfuls flour. Mix, cover, and let rise till light; then add Crisco, remainder of sugar and flour, raisins, peel, and extract. Knead lightly, cover, and let rise. Divide into small pieces, let rise on greased tins, brush over with beaten egg and bake in hot oven twenty minutes. Sufficient for twenty-two buns.
A straightforward sweet yeast dough from one of the early Crisco-sponsored cookbooks, built on a sponge. Most of the work of translating it is in the yeast, the fat and the oven.
- The yeast cakeOne 1915 yeast cake is roughly equivalent to one packet of modern active dry or instant yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons). Dissolve it in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as directed; instant yeast can simply be stirred into the sponge flour.
- "Hot oven"In this period a hot oven means about 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits buns of this size; pull them when the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow.
- The single eggThe ingredient list gives one egg and the method uses it only for brushing the risen buns. There is no egg in the dough itself, which is why the crumb is closer to a plain sweet bread than to a brioche.
- CriscoThree-quarters of a cup of shortening is a generous amount and makes a tender, soft-crumbed bun. Butter at the same weight works and tastes better, though the buns will stale a little faster. This book was published to promote Crisco, so the fat is doing advertising duty as much as culinary.
- Scalding the milkScalding is generally explained as deactivating substances in raw milk (whey proteins and proteolytic activity) that can weaken gluten. With pasteurized milk it is usually held to be unnecessary, but you still want the milk warm rather than hot when the yeast goes in, or you will kill it.
- Citron peelCandied citron is the thick peel of Citrus medica, sold in blocks or diced around the winter holidays. Mixed candied peel or candied orange peel substitutes without trouble; use the same quarter cup, chopped fine.
- Flour and rising timesFive and a half cups is a starting point, not a rule; hold back the last half cup until the dough comes together. No times are given for either rise. Expect roughly an hour for the sponge and an hour to ninety minutes for the bulk rise, plus 30-45 minutes on the tins.
- YieldTwenty-two buns from this quantity means pieces of about 2 ounces, roughly 2 inches across before rising. Space them on the tin so they touch slightly as they prove if you want soft sides.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks to use Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911 as an alternative to lard and butter. That commercial purpose explains the three-quarters of a cup of shortening in a bun dough that a nineteenth-century cook would more likely have enriched with butter. The buns themselves belong to a long British and American tradition of enriched yeast dough studded with dried fruit and candied peel, the same family as the hot cross bun and the Bath bun. Citron, the knobbly thick-skinned citrus whose peel is candied rather than juiced, was a standard holiday-baking staple in American pantries well into the mid-twentieth century, sold from bulk boxes at the grocer alongside candied orange and lemon peel; its retreat to a once-a-year fruitcake ingredient is fairly recent.