Home › The Principles of Cookery › Seed Buns
Seed Buns
Put four pounds of dried and sifted flour into a bowl, and mix with it a pinch of salt and one pound of Demerara sugar. Make a hollow in the centre, and pour into this a quarter of a pint of good yeast beaten up with a pint of lukewarm milk, and as much flour as will make a light batter. Cover the bowl, and leave it in a warm place for two hours. At the end of that time knead the contents well, and work in a pound of butter dissolved till it will run, but not hot, and as much warm milk as will make a soft dough. Cover the bowl again, and let the dough rise for an hour, when it will be ready for making up into buns. It is a good plan to divide it, and make one portion into plain buns, another into currant buns, and a third into seed buns. For seed buns, take a pound of the plain dough, work into it half an ounce of caraway-seeds, and form it into little balls. Put these into buttered patty-pans, and let them rise before the fire for a few minutes. Brush them over with white of egg or with milk, and sprinkle a little powdered sugar over the top. Bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A large enriched yeast dough — four pounds of flour, a pound of butter and a pound of sugar — meant to be split three ways, with the seed buns as one third. Most of what needs translating is the yeast, the oven and the pans.
- The yeast is the sticking pointA quarter-pint of "good yeast" indicates a live liquid yeast, most likely brewer's barm, of very variable strength, and it cannot be converted honestly to a spoon measure. Judge by the dough rather than the clock: the initial batter is ready when it is domed and visibly bubbling, and the kneaded dough when it has doubled, which in a warm kitchen may well take longer than the hour given.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour is about 14 to 16 cups and yields a very large quantity of dough — several dozen buns. Quartering the whole recipe gives a single manageable batch; the seed buns alone use one pound of the finished dough, which makes roughly a dozen of the little balls the recipe describes.
- Drying and sifting the flourFlour was often kept in sacks where it picked up damp, and period cookery books routinely direct that it be dried and warmed before the fire before baking. Modern bagged flour needs neither; sift only if you want to lighten it.
- Demerara sugarStill sold under that name — coarse, pale brown, faintly molassed. It dissolves slowly, so give the dough a thorough knead. Turbinado or light brown sugar substitutes without much loss.
- Butter "dissolved till it will run, but not hot"Melt it and let it cool to lukewarm, around blood heat. Butter that is genuinely hot — from about 130F up — will kill yeast on contact, and even warm butter slackens the dough.
- Caraway quantityHalf an ounce to a pound of dough is about two tablespoons — assertive by current taste. Two teaspoons gives a clearly seeded bun without dominating it.
- Patty-pansSmall individual tins, generally shallower than a modern muffin cup; a muffin tin is the nearest ready equivalent. Butter them well, as the sugar in the dough catches.
- "A well-heated oven"Take that as 400 to 425F. Ten to fifteen minutes is right at that heat for buns of muffin-tin size; they should sound hollow and read about 190F inside.
- The glazeWhite of egg gives gloss and helps the sugar stick; milk gives a softer, browner crust. Sprinkle the powdered sugar on immediately after brushing, before the surface dries.
Seed buns belong to the long English tradition of caraway in sweet baking, which ran from Tudor comfits and seed cake through to the Victorian tea table before falling sharply out of fashion in the twentieth century. The structure here is the more telling detail: Cassell's gives one large enriched dough and then splits it into plain, currant and seed buns, a division that suggests a household or small bakehouse in which a rise was too valuable to waste on a single small batch. The costing — a penny each — is characteristic of the dictionary, which was written for mistresses and cooks who had to answer for the housekeeping money, and it reflects a period when butter and sugar in that quantity were a real, quantifiable expense rather than an assumption.