Home › The Principles of Cookery › American Breakfast Buns
American Breakfast Buns
Take the chill off a quarter of a pint of milk, and mix it with the same quantity of fresh yeast; add a quarter of a pound of butter melted, but not hot, sugar to taste, and a couple of eggs well beaten, and then, very gradually, sufficient flour to make a tolerably firm dough. Put it into small tins, well oiling them first; set them before the fire for about twenty minutes to rise, and bake in a quick oven. Do not make the buns too large. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Sufficient for a dozen buns. Probable cost, 8d.
A rich, quick-rising bun dough of the kind Cassell's filed under everyday breakfast baking. Two things need translating before you start: the yeast quantity, which assumes brewer's barm rather than anything sold today, and the very short single rise.
- The yeast is the sticking pointA quarter of a pint of "fresh yeast" means liquid barm skimmed from brewing or bought from a brewer, not the compressed cake sold now. For this quantity of dough use about 15 g (1/2 oz) fresh compressed yeast or 1 1/2 teaspoons instant dried yeast; a quarter pint of modern fresh yeast would be wildly excessive.
- Imperial quarter-pint5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 US cup of milk. "Take the chill off" means barely warmed -- tepid, and at most blood heat, no hotter, or the yeast suffers.
- Quarter pound of butter115 g, melted and cooled to lukewarm. This is an enriched dough, closer to a brioche than a bread roll, and it will be soft and slack until the flour is fully worked in.
- Flour quantity is left to judgementExpect roughly 400-450 g (about 3 to 3 1/2 cups) of plain flour for a "tolerably firm" dough. Add it gradually as directed; the eggs and butter make it hard to judge by eye.
- Quick oven425-450F (220-230C). Buns this rich colour fast, so watch the last five minutes and drop to 400F if they are darkening before the centre sets.
- Twenty minutes will not be enoughThe original assumes a lively barm and a hot hearth. With modern yeast in a normal kitchen, allow 45-60 minutes for the shaped buns to become visibly puffy, or longer in a cool room.
- Tins"Small tins" means individual moulds, patty pans or a muffin tray, greased. The recipe does not say why the buns should be kept small, but a likely reason is that large buns of this richness stay doughy in the middle at a quick oven heat.
- Yield and costA dozen buns, best eaten the day they are baked. The eightpence is a Victorian retail estimate and tells you only that this was regarded as a modest, everyday bake.
Cassell's gives no reason for the name, but these differ from the English tea bun in being sweeter, far richer in butter and egg, and raised quickly for the breakfast table rather than left overnight. Hot breads served at breakfast were one of the things British travellers most often remarked on in the United States. The instruction to set the tins before the fire is a reminder of how these kitchens worked, with the open range doing the proving as well as the roasting. The yeast measurement reflects an older supply chain, when a household bought or was given liquid barm from a brewery and measured it by volume; compressed yeast in cakes was spreading through the later Victorian period but had not yet displaced that habit.