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Hot Cross Buns
1/4 cupful sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 3/4 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 egg 1/2 yeast cake Flour 1/4 cupful chopped candied citron peel 1/2 cupful seeded raisins 1 cupful scalded milk 1/4 cupful lukewarm water Add Crisco, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add yeast cake dissolved in water, spices, egg well beaten, and sufficient flour to make a stiff dough. Mix well, add raisins and peel, cover, and let rise over night. In morning divide into pieces and form into neat buns; place in Criscoed pan one inch apart, let rise, brush over with milk or beaten egg, and bake in moderately hot oven twenty-five minutes. Cool, and with ornamental frosting make a cross on each bun. The cross may be made by placing strips of paste on buns before they are baked.
Sufficient for twenty buns.
A straightforward overnight sweet dough, but the original leaves the flour quantity to your judgement and measures yeast in a form that no longer exists on shelves.
- Flour "sufficient"With one cup of milk plus a quarter cup of water, a stiff dough lands at roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it gradually; the dough should clear the bowl but stay soft, since the fruit will stiffen it further.
- Half a yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period were commonly about 0.6 oz, so half is on the order of 1 teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast. The small quantity suits a slow overnight rise.
- Scalded milkScalding is generally explained as deactivating components of raw milk that weaken gluten. Pasteurized milk needs no scalding, but do warm it enough to melt the shortening, then cool to lukewarm before the yeast goes in or you will kill it.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, as does butter, which will taste better. Three tablespoons is about 40 g. "Criscoed pan" simply means greased.
- Moderately hot ovenThat is 375-400F. Twenty-five minutes at 375F suits buns of this size; they are done at an internal temperature of about 190F, or when the bottoms sound hollow.
- Candied citronCitron peel is still sold at holiday time but is scarce otherwise. Mixed candied peel, or candied orange peel, substitutes directly at the same quarter cup.
- The overnight riseThe instruction presumably assumes a cool kitchen. In a warm modern room the dough may blow out and collapse by morning; the refrigerator is the reliable equivalent, with an hour to warm up before shaping.
- The crossesThe pastry-strip method gives the sturdier result; a piped flour-and-water paste applied just before baking works the same way. Icing crosses must go on cooled buns or they will slide off.
- YieldTwenty buns, which means pieces of roughly 55-60 g each. Spacing them one inch apart lets them touch as they prove, giving the soft sides characteristic of the bun.
Hot cross buns are traditionally associated with Good Friday, the cross generally read as marking the crucifixion, and spiced enriched breads of this kind were sold by London street criers well before the nineteenth century — the familiar street cry survives as a nursery rhyme. What is notable here is the setting: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, which is why a lard-or-butter dough of great antiquity arrives specifying three tablespoons of a branded product and a "Criscoed pan." The recipe also shows the domestic baking of the era in miniature: yeast bought as a perishable compressed cake, one small piece of it set to work overnight in a cool kitchen, and candied citron treated as an ordinary pantry staple rather than a seasonal specialty.