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GENEVA BUNS (another way)
Rub three ounces of butter into two pounds of flour, and set the sponge with a table-spoonful of yeast, mixed with a pint of new milk; add a little salt, and some saffron water, if liked. Let it rise one hour. Beat two eggs, and stir in a quarter of a pint of hot milk; then knead up the dough with the eggs when milkwarm. Let the dough stay before the fire half an hour longer, then make small rolls, brush them with yolk of egg, and bake them from twenty to thirty minutes. If a rich bun is desired, add six ounces of sugar, three ounces of butter, half a pound of currants, the grated rind of a lemon, and two ounces of candied orange-peel. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient for eighteen buns.
A yeast-raised enriched bun in the Victorian sponge-and-dough manner, with an optional fruited version. The original assumes brewer's barm and a bread oven, so the two things needing translation are the yeast and the heat.
- YeastA tablespoonful of yeast means a home-baking yeast of the period, most likely liquid barm or compressed yeast, weaker and more variable than modern dried yeast. For 2 lb (about 900 g) flour use roughly 2 teaspoons instant dried yeast, or 15-20 g fresh.
- The spongeSetting the sponge means mixing the yeast and the pint of milk into flour to make a loose batter and leaving it to ferment the stated hour before the dough is finished. The recipe does not say how much of the flour goes in at this stage. That first hour is where the flavour comes from; do not shortcut it.
- New milk and milkwarmNew milk is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed. Milkwarm is blood heat, about 98-100F (37C) - the eggs and hot milk must be cooled to that before they meet the sponge or the yeast will suffer.
- Saffron waterA pinch of saffron threads steeped in a few tablespoons of hot water until the liquid is deep orange, then added with the milk. It colours more than it flavours at this scale; a large pinch for the full batch is plenty.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Small enriched rolls of this kind want a moderately hot oven, 400-425F (200-220C); at that heat the stated twenty to thirty minutes is generous, and buns this size are usually done in 15-20.
- Rising before the fireThe half hour before the fire is a warm proof. A draught-free spot at around 80F (27C) does the same job, and the dough should be visibly puffed rather than strictly timed.
- The rich versionThe sugar, extra butter, currants, lemon rind and candied peel go in at the final kneading, after the sponge has worked. Adding sugar and fat at the sponge stage slows fermentation noticeably.
- Yield and costEighteen buns, so roughly 100 g of dough each for the plain version and more for the rich. The "probable cost, 1d. each" is a Victorian housekeeping figure and has no modern equivalent.
Cassell's gives Geneva buns among the plain and enriched breakfast breads that filled the gap between a loaf and a cake, and the recipe belongs to a large Victorian family of yeasted buns - Bath, Chelsea, saffron, hot cross - all built on the same sponge-and-dough method inherited from the bakehouse. The name is not securely explained: it is generally traced to the Swiss city, though nineteenth-century bun names attached themselves to places loosely and often had little to do with local practice. The saffron is the older element here, a colouring and flavouring used in English baking since the medieval period and still surviving in the saffron buns of Cornwall; Cassell's makes it optional. The two-tier structure of the recipe - plain first, then "if a rich bun is desired" - is characteristic of the dictionary's approach, letting a household scale the sugar, butter and dried fruit to what it could afford.