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Christmas Bun, Scottish
Put one tea-spoonful of salt into two pounds of flour, and rub into it three-quarters of a pound of butter; add a little warm water and two table-spoonfuls of fresh yeast, and knead it into a light paste. Put aside about one-third of this paste, and work into the rest one pound and a half of currants, picked and dried, two pounds of stoned raisins, four ounces of blanched almonds chopped small, half a pound of candied lemon, citron, and orange together, all finely minced, and a quarter of an ounce each of white pepper, ground ginger, and powdered cinnamon. When these are well worked in, shape the mass into a cylindrical form like a cheese. Roll out the paste which was set aside, and put it round the bun so as to make a sort of case for it. Wet the edges, and fasten them together to make them lie quite flat. Prick some holes in the top, and run a skewer from the top to the bottom in two or three places. Flour some thick paper and wrap the bun in it, binding it well with tape to keep it in shape. Bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, one hour and a half or more. Probable cost, 3s. for this quantity.
This is Scottish black bun in its Victorian form: a very dense fruit mass sealed inside a yeasted butter pastry. Most of the adjustments concern the bake, which the original underestimates.
- Bake it low and longA "moderate oven" is usually glossed as around 350F/180C, but a cylinder of this size — some four and a quarter pounds of fruit and nuts in a case, close to seven pounds of bun in all — will scorch outside before the middle sets. Modern practice for black bun is nearer 300-325F for two and a half to three hours, and the stated "one hour and a half or more" is best read as a minimum.
- The paper wrappingThe floured paper bound with tape is insulation, doing the job a lined tin now does. Bake it in a greased and parchment-lined loaf or round cake tin, with a collar of parchment standing above the rim, or wrap the shaped bun in two layers of parchment and one of foil.
- Yeast quantitiesTwo tablespoons of fresh yeast is roughly 20-30 g of compressed yeast. If using instant dried yeast, a little under a third of that by weight is the usual equivalent. The paste is enriched with three-quarters of a pound of butter and barely rises; the yeast is for texture, not lift.
- The spicing is assertiveA quarter ounce each of white pepper, ginger and cinnamon is roughly a level tablespoon of each. The white pepper is authentic to black bun and not a misprint, but it makes a noticeably peppery cake by current tastes — halve it if that worries you.
- Stoned raisins and dried currants"Stoned" means the pits removed by hand; supermarket raisins are already seedless. "Picked and dried" currants means sorted for stalks and grit, then spread out to dry after washing — worth doing, as wet fruit will make the paste slack.
- Sealing and ventingThe hinge of the recipe is the case. Roll the reserved third thin enough to wrap the whole cylinder, wet the edges and press them flat so no fruit breaks through; the pricked holes and the skewer channels let steam escape from the centre, which is what stops the middle staying raw.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities give a bun of about 7 lb, cut in thin slices for twenty-plus people. Like all such buns it improves after two or three weeks wrapped in parchment in a tin, and will keep for months.
Black bun is the Hogmanay cake of Scotland, though it is often said to have begun as a Twelfth Night cake and to have shifted to New Year's Eve as Scottish observance of Christmas itself was suppressed after the Reformation. Cassell's files it under "Christmas Bun, Scottish" rather than by its familiar name. The construction, a spiced fruit mass sealed inside a plain paste and baked slowly, belongs to a much older British family of enclosed cakes and pies in which the crust is armour and keeping-case rather than eating: the pastry took the heat, and the fruit within stayed moist for weeks. The white pepper is the surviving trace of a medieval and early modern habit of spicing sweet baking with what we now think of as savoury pepper. Cassell's costing of three shillings for this quantity marks it as a serious festive undertaking rather than everyday baking; the butter, almonds and half a pound of candied peel alone would have accounted for most of it.