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Hot Cross Buns
Mix 2 pounds of flour with a small teaspoonful of powdered spice and half a teaspoonful of salt. Rub in half a pound of good butter. Make a hollow in the flour, and pour in a wine-glassful of yeast and half a pint of warmed milk slightly colored with saffron. Mix the surrounding flour with the milk and yeast to a thin batter; throw a little dry flour over, and set the pan before the fire to rise. When risen, work in a little sugar, 1 egg, half a pound of currants, and milk to make a soft dough. Cover over as before, and let it stand half an hour. Then make the dough into buns, and mark them with the back of a knife. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to bake.
A plain Victorian bun dough, enriched with butter, egg and currants and tinted with saffron. The quantities are large by modern standards and the leavening is given in the old brewer's measure.
- ScaleTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups, and will give about 24 buns. Halve everything if that is more than you want to bake at once.
- A wine-glassful of yeastThis means liquid barm or brewer's yeast, about 2 fl oz. Substitute roughly 2 teaspoons of instant or 1 tablespoon of active dry yeast, stirred into the warm saffron milk.
- Powdered spiceEnglish recipes of this date generally mean mixed spice: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and a little clove. A "small teaspoonful" for 2 lb of flour is restrained by modern taste, and many bakers today would use more.
- Saffron milkSteep a good pinch of saffron threads in the milk while it warms, then cool it to about 105F before it meets the yeast. Milk hot enough to "warm" a pan by the fire can kill the leavening.
- Setting before the fireThe pan was set in a warm spot, warmer than a modern kitchen. At ordinary room temperature the sponge will likely take 45 minutes to an hour; the original gives no time for this first rise. The second rest of half an hour is a minimum rather than a rule.
- Sugar and eggNo quantity is given for the sugar; 2 to 3 oz (about 1/3 to 1/2 cup) suits this weight of flour. Add the milk for the final dough gradually, as the absorbency of modern flour will differ from that of the flour this was written for.
- The crossMarking with the back of a knife was the older method; the piped flour-and-water paste cross is a later habit. A knife-cut cross closes up somewhat as the buns prove, so cut it deeply just before baking.
- OvenThe book gives no oven temperature, only fifteen to twenty minutes, which suggests a fairly brisk oven; around 400F works. Glaze with milk or sugar syrup as they come out for shine.
Spiced, currant-studded buns marked with a cross are tied to Good Friday in England, and the association is old enough that the buns were sold by street criers well before this book was printed; the "one a penny, two a penny" cry is recorded from the eighteenth century. The saffron here is the interesting detail: it belongs to a long English tradition of yellow festival breads, most persistently in Cornwall, where saffron cake is still baked, and it supplies colour as much as flavour. Raising the dough in two stages, sponge first and then the fruit and sugar worked in, is a common approach for enriched doughs of the period, since sugar and fruit can slow the yeast if added at the start -- though in this recipe the butter is rubbed into the flour before the sponge is set.