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Plum Buns, Made with Yeast
Mix half a tea-spoonful of salt with three pounds of best flour. Rub into this three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter or good beef dripping. Put the mixture into a bowl, and make a hole in the centre. Moisten an ounce of German yeast smoothly and gradually with three-quarters of a pint of lukewarm water. If preferred, a quarter of a pint of good brewer's yeast may be substituted for the German yeast. Put the yeast into the hollow, and mix with it a little of the flour till it is like thin batter, then put it on the hearth for about an hour to sponge. Whisk two fresh eggs, and mix with them twelve ounces of moist sugar. Stir them into the yeast, and knead the dough thoroughly with a pint of warm milk. Cover it with a cloth, and let it stand until it is lightly risen. It will require about an hour and a half. Add six ounces of well-washed and dried currants, mould the dough into buns about the size of a large egg, place them in rows upon a buttered baking-tin, with fully three inches between them, and set them before the fire for about ten minutes to rise. Bake in a brisk oven for about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for about three dozen buns.
A large batch of sweet enriched yeast buns, scaled for a Victorian household and easily halved. The measurements are imperial, so a pint here is 20 fl oz, not 16.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed baker's yeast; 1 oz is about 28 g, equivalent to roughly 14 g active dry or 9 g instant yeast. The brewer's yeast alternative means liquid barm skimmed from a fermenting brew, not the powdered nutritional brewer's yeast sold today, which is dead and will not raise anything.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown sugar. Twelve ounces (340 g) against three pounds of flour is a heavily sweetened dough, and sugar at that level slows the yeast noticeably, which may account for the long rises.
- Quantities in metric3 lb flour is about 1.36 kg, 12 oz butter or dripping 340 g, 6 oz currants 170 g. Liquid comes to 15 fl oz water plus 20 fl oz milk, near 1 litre in all, giving a soft, slack dough rather than a stiff one.
- A brisk ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a brisk oven is conventionally read as hot, somewhere around 425F/220C. With this much sugar the buns colour fast, so check at ten minutes; twelve to fifteen minutes suits buns the size of a large egg, and 400F/200C is safer if your oven runs hot.
- The hearth"On the hearth" and "before the fire" mean a warm draught-free spot around 75-80F/24-27C. A turned-off oven with the light on does the same job. Too hot a spot will kill the sponge before it works.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh blackcurrants or redcurrants. Washing removes dust and grit from the dried fruit, and drying it again matters because damp fruit will slacken and sticky up the dough.
- Beef drippingThe dripping option is a thrift measure and gives a savoury, slightly meaty crumb. Butter is the better choice for a sweet bun unless you want that older flavour deliberately.
- Yield and timingThree dozen buns is a great deal of dough for a modern kitchen; halving the recipe works without adjustment. Total time is roughly three hours of rising plus baking. They toast well the next morning.
Yeast-raised sweet buns studded with currants were the everyday counterpart to the richer, spiced buns of the baker's shop, and the qualifier "made with yeast" in the title implies a chemically raised version elsewhere in the book, the two technologies competing in British kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century. Compressed yeast, pressed into cakes and sold by weight, was imported from continental distilleries and breweries and had become common in Britain over the later nineteenth century, steadily displacing the liquid barm that home bakers had begged or bought from a brewery. It kept better and worked more predictably than hop-laden ale barm, which may be why the recipe treats brewer's yeast as the substitute rather than the first choice. The costing at 2s 6d for three dozen works out at under a penny a bun, and Cassell's readership was managing a household budget.