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Buns, Light Tea
Take one pound of flour, half a tea-spoonful of tartaric acid, and the same quantity of carbonate of soda, and work all well together through a sieve; then rub two ounces of butter into the flour, being very careful to leave no lumps. When this is thoroughly mixed, add a quarter of a pound of well-dried currants, two ounces of sifted sugar, and a very few carawayseeds. Next mix half a pint of milk with one egg, make a hole in the middle of the flour, and pour in the milk, working it all lightly together. Do not touch the dough with the hand, or the buns will be heavy, but place it in lumps on the baking-tin with a fork. Probable cost for a dozen cakes, 1s.
A rubbed-in, chemically leavened tea bun — essentially a drop scone dough with currants and caraway. The original gives no oven temperature or time, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: do not handle the doughThe instruction to spoon the mixture onto the tin with a fork rather than touching it is the whole technique. This is a wet, soft dough; kneading or shaping it develops gluten and gives dense, tough buns. Work the liquid in with as few strokes as will bring it together, then drop it in rough heaps.
- Oven and timeBake at 425F/220C for 12-15 minutes, until risen and lightly coloured underneath. Chemical leaveners give their lift in the first minutes, so the oven must be fully hot before the dough goes in.
- Tartaric acid and sodaHalf a teaspoon of each was a homemade baking powder, mixed in the bowl. Two rounded teaspoons of modern baking powder to the pound of flour does much the same job more reliably; tartaric acid is still sold, but it acts fast and wet, so the batter cannot be left standing.
- MeasuresOne pound of flour is about 450g or 3 1/2 cups. Half a pint in an English book of this date is 10 fl oz (1 1/4 US cups), not 8 — the dough should be soft enough to drop from a fork, so hold a little milk back and judge it.
- Sifted sugar"Sifted sugar" here means caster or finely ground white sugar, sieved to break lumps, not icing sugar. Two ounces is 55g, which makes these only faintly sweet by current standards.
- Well-dried currantsThe drying mattered when dried fruit arrived gritty and damp; today, rinse only if the currants look dusty and dry them thoroughly on a cloth, since wet fruit sinks and streaks the crumb.
- Caraway"A very few" is sound advice — a quarter teaspoon of seed through the whole batch. Caraway in sweet baking was ordinary in Victorian Britain and reads as savoury to many modern palates.
- YieldAbout twelve buns, as the costing implies. They are best the day they are made; like scones, they stale within hours and are better split and toasted the next morning.
Cassell's belongs to the era when quick breads were transforming home baking: an acid and an alkali married in the mixing bowl freed the cook from yeast, and from the hours of proving that yeast demanded. Bicarbonate of soda paired with tartaric acid or cream of tartar was a common household leavening from the mid-nineteenth century, and recipes like this one — flour, butter rubbed in, fruit, milk and an egg, baked at once — meant afternoon tea could be produced at short notice. The caraway seed is the older signature: seed cakes and caraway comfits were a long-standing English sweetmeat. The "probable cost" of a shilling a dozen is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households keeping close accounts.