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Guernsey Buns
Rub four ounces of butter into one pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt and two table-spoonfuls of yeast, with as much milk as will form a dough. Let it rise. Divide it into buns about the size of an egg. Place these on buttered tins, three inches apart, and put them in a warm place. When they have risen to twice their original size, bake them in a quick oven. Time, about a quarter of an hour to bake. Probable cost, a halfpenny each. Sufficient for eight or nine buns.
A plain enriched bun dough, rubbed rather than creamed, and short on the detail a modern baker expects. The two things worth pinning down are the yeast and the oven.
- The yeastTwo tablespoonfuls means wet brewer's barm or fresh compressed yeast slaked in liquid, not a dry powder. Around 20-25 g fresh yeast, or 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast stirred into the flour, gives a comparable lift.
- "As much milk as will form a dough"For a pound (450 g) of flour expect roughly 250-300 ml of milk, warmed to blood heat. Aim for a soft, slightly tacky dough rather than a firm one; the butter will stiffen it as it chills.
- "A quick oven"425-450F (220-230C). Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for buns of this size; below about 400F they dry out before they colour.
- Rubbing in, not creamingFour ounces of butter to a pound of flour is rubbed into the flour as for pastry; the recipe does not say whether the butter should be cold. Rubbing in was the usual way of distributing fat through flour, and may give a slightly shorter crumb than butter kneaded into an already-formed dough.
- The first riseNo time is given. In a warm kitchen the bulk rise takes about an hour, until roughly doubled; the shaped buns need a further 30-45 minutes to double again before baking.
- Size and yieldEight or nine buns from a pound of flour works out at around 100 g of dough each, noticeably bigger than an egg. Either take the count or take the size, not both: egg-sized pieces will give you a dozen or more.
- SpacingThree inches apart is deliberate. These are meant to bake as separate, crusty buns rather than pulling apart in a batch, so resist crowding the tin.
- CostThe halfpenny each is the book's own estimate of what the buns cost to make, and is no guide to modern prices.
Guernsey and the other Channel Islands were known in nineteenth-century Britain above all for dairying, and the Guernsey cow's rich yellow milk and butter carried weight as a selling point. The island's own best-known baking is Guernsey gâche, a heavy fruited butter bread. Cassell's, compiled as an alphabetical dictionary for middle-class households, collected many regional and semi-regional bun recipes side by side; the appeal of this one is that it has no sugar at all, which puts it closer to a tea roll than to the sweetened buns the word suggests today.