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Spanish Bun
One cup of melted butter, two cups of sugar, three cups or flour, four eggs, one cup of milk, three teaspoons of baking powder, two teaspoons of cinnamon, one teaspoon of cloves, a little nutmeg; stir all together. Bake in shallow tins.
— Miss Louise W. Havens
A plain spiced sheet cake of the sort a village cook could put together in one bowl. The proportions are sound; what the receipt withholds is the oven, the pan size and the time.
- The hinge: don't take "stir all together" literallyWhisk the flour, baking powder and spices together first, and beat the eggs and sugar with the melted butter and milk before combining. Undispersed leavening and spice can leave streaks and off-tasting patches in the crumb.
- Cup measuresRead the cup as the standard half-pint, 8 fluid ounces, though the receipt does not say so; flour was measured by volume, not weighed. Three cups will come to roughly 360-450 g depending on how you fill the cup; err on the lighter side, since a cup of melted butter (about 225 g, two US sticks) is already a generous fat load.
- OvenNo temperature is given at all. 350F suits a batter of this kind.
- Shallow tinsThis is a sheet-cake batter, not a loaf. A 9x13-inch pan takes 30-35 minutes; two 9-inch square pans or a rimmed jelly-roll tin bake in 20-25. In a deep pan the centre is liable to sink.
- Melted butterLet it cool to barely warm before it meets the eggs, or you will begin to cook them. Melted butter also means no creaming, so the crumb comes out closer and denser than a modern butter cake -- that is correct for this recipe.
- SpicesTwo teaspoons of cinnamon and one of cloves is assertive by current taste. If you find it heavy, a half teaspoon of cloves gives a gentler cake, though the receipt as written calls for a full teaspoon.
- Yield and finishingAbout 16 squares from a 9x13. The receipt says nothing about finishing; cut in squares, plain or with a dusting of sugar or a thin icing, as you like.
"Spanish bun" appears throughout American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, and by the time it reached a book like this it was no longer Spanish and no longer much of a bun -- earlier American and English versions were yeast-raised sweet buns, but here it is a spiced sheet cake, cut in squares and usually iced. The name is often said to derive from older English and Dutch baking, where "Spanish" attached loosely to sweet, heavily spiced goods, though that account is folk tradition rather than established etymology. Its presence among the village receipts here is telling: a one-bowl cake built on round numbers -- one, two, three, four -- that a contributor could recite from memory and a subscriber could copy without a scale. The generous cinnamon and cloves are the signature of the form.