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Chelsea Buns
Take bread dough that is ready for the Roll thin and spread with butter (or butter and lard).
Sprinkle sugar over it.
Do this 3 times. After the third time, sprinkle ground cinnamon over dough. Have currants washed and dried, and put over the cinnamon quite thick. Cut in strips about ¾ inch wide and roll each strip separately (make about the size of an ordinary bun). Stand these on end in a greased tin. Let stand until very light. Then bake.
A rolled sweet bun built on plain bread dough, with no oven setting or timing given. The instructions assume a cook who already has a batch of dough rising and knows what a proved bun looks like.
- The doughAny lean white bread dough works. The recipe gives no quantity; as a guide, about 1 lb (450 g) of risen dough should make roughly a dozen buns. Use it after the first rise, when it is slack enough to roll but still springy.
- "Do this 3 times"Ambiguous as written. It may mean folding and re-rolling between each buttering and sugaring, so the fat and sugar end up in layers, or simply repeating the butter-and-sugar over the same sheet. On the first reading it is a rough laminated dough rather than a single spiral of filling.
- Butter and lardLard would have been the cheaper fat, and its firmness at room temperature may help keep the layers distinct. All butter is fine; the recipe gives no amount, but about 4 oz (115 g) total across the three turns is a reasonable guide, softened rather than melted so it stays put.
- CurrantsZante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Washing and drying was needed to remove packing grit and dust; modern dried currants only need a short soak in warm water if they are hard, then a thorough pat dry so they do not steam the dough.
- Cutting and standing on endStrips ¾ inch wide, rolled up individually and set cut-side up in a greased tin. The recipe does not say how closely; Chelsea buns are usually set close enough to touch, so that they push against each other as they prove and rise tall rather than spreading.
- "Until very light"The second prove, in a warm place, until the buns have roughly doubled and a fingertip leaves a dent that fills back slowly. Depending on the dough and the warmth of the room this may take upwards of 45 minutes. Under-proved buns bake dense.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. A modern equivalent would be around 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are well browned and the sugar at the edges has caught. Sugar and currants scorch easily, so cover loosely if they colour early.
- FinishingChelsea buns are commonly brushed hot with a thin sugar-and-milk glaze or plain sugar syrup, though this recipe does not mention it. Turn them out of the tin fairly promptly or the caramelised sugar welds them to the base.
- YieldOn the estimate above, about a dozen buns; best eaten the day they are baked.
Chelsea buns take their name from the Chelsea Bun House in London, a bakery that traded through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth and drew crowds — royal patronage among them, by long tradition — before it was pulled down in the 1830s. The bun outlived the shop and became a standard of British and colonial baking: a square, currant-studded spiral, stood on end in a greased tin. Five Roses collected what home cooks were already making, and a bun that starts from "bread dough that is ready" belonged to a kitchen where bread was set weekly and sweet baking followed from it rather than being mixed from scratch.