Home › The Principles of Cookery › Suffolk Buns
Suffolk Buns
Rub four ounces of lard into a pound of flour; add a spoonful of salt, two tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, and three table-spoonfuls of currants or caraway-seeds. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly; whisk two eggs and stir them into the mixture, to make a smooth firm paste. A little milk may be added if necessary. Roll the paste out to the thickness of an inch. Stamp it in rounds, and bake these on tins in a gentle oven. If preferred, ground rice and butter may be used instead of flour and lard. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour.
A stiff, scone-like bun that sits between a rock cake and a shortcake. Two things in the original need attention: the salt, which is stated vaguely, and the baking time, which belongs to a cooler oven than yours.
- Weights in modern termsA pound of flour is about 3½ cups (450 g); four ounces of lard is 115 g, or half a cup. Three tablespoons of sugar is modest by current standards, so these are only lightly sweet.
- That "spoonful of salt"Genuinely ambiguous, and a full tablespoon would ruin the batch. Read it as a level teaspoon for a pound of flour.
- A gentle ovenRoughly 325°F (160°C). Victorian oven terms are verbal rather than numeric; 'gentle' sits below 'moderate', which is conventionally read today as about 350°F.
- Three-quarters of an hour is too longInch-thick rounds of a firm egg paste are done in about 20–25 minutes at 350°F, pale gold and dry at the centre. The long original time goes with the slow oven specified; held for 45 minutes in a modern oven the buns dry to biscuit.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Three tablespoons is a light scattering; double it if you want a fruited bun rather than a plain one.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to a pound of flour is on the low side for today's double-acting powder, but the eggs do much of the lifting here. Do not increase it, or the buns take on a soapy edge.
- The ground rice variationGround rice is rice ground to a fine meal, a little coarser than modern rice flour, and it has no gluten. The original offers it as a straight swap for the flour, bound by the eggs; substituting a quarter to a third of the flour is a safer route to the short, sandy crumb.
- HandlingMix only until the paste comes together, roll to a full inch, and stamp with a 2½-inch cutter without twisting. Expect about ten buns.
Named buns like these are scattered through Victorian cookery books as regional shorthand rather than fixed formulas — a Suffolk bun, a Bath bun and a Banbury cake are all different animals. Caraway, offered here as an equal alternative to currants, was a standing flavouring in seed cakes and plain buns through the nineteenth century, and it faded from British home baking largely in the twentieth. The lard is a period signal: it is treated here as the default shortening, with butter as the refinement mentioned in the final sentence, alongside ground rice — a common Victorian way to shorten a paste.