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Currant Buns (Bread Dough)
Use Five Roses flour for bread, and when your bread is ready to put in the pans reserve enough for a small loaf. Break an egg in a cup, put in a piece of butter the size of a small egg and 3 tablespoons sugar -beat to a cream, then fill up cup with sweet cream and mix all through your small loaf, adding ¼ cup currants. Do not use much flour, but keep your dough soft.
After a thorough mixing, put away to rise.
When risen to twice original bulk, make into small buns. When these have again risen, bake in a good hot oven. On removing from oven, gloss over with a little cream and sugar. oven.
This is a piggyback recipe: it assumes you already have a batch of bread dough rising on the counter and simply enriches a portion of it. The scale depends entirely on how big your "small loaf" is, so fix that first.
- How much doughReckon on roughly 1 lb / 450-500 g of risen bread dough. "A small loaf" is not a fixed quantity, so this is a working estimate rather than a period standard; take much more and the enrichment will be lost and the buns will taste like plain bread.
- Butter the size of a small eggPeriod equivalence tables usually reckon butter "the size of an egg" at around 2 oz, so allow roughly 1 1/2-2 oz (3-4 tablespoons) for a small one. Softened, not melted, so it creams with the sugar and egg.
- Sweet creamPlain fresh cream, unsweetened, as opposed to the soured or clabbered cream that was also in use in kitchens of this period. Any cream from light to heavy works; add whatever it takes to fill the cup once the egg, butter and sugar are in, which will be nearer half a cup than a couple of spoonfuls.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh currant berries. Plump them in warm water for ten minutes and pat dry if they are hard, or they will pull moisture from the crumb.
- Keep the dough softThis is the hinge. You are working fat, sugar, egg and liquid into dough that has already been developed, and the instinct is to add flour until it stops sticking. Resist it -- a slack, tacky dough gives a tender bun; a floured-up one bakes dense.
- Expect slow risesSugar and fat both retard yeast, and the dough has just been knocked back hard. The first rise to double may take 1 to 1½ hours, the shaped buns another 45 minutes to an hour. Judge by bulk, not the clock.
- A good hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; a "good hot oven" is usually taken today as around 400-425F. Small enriched buns want 12-18 minutes; the sugar means they colour faster than bread, so check at 12.
- The glazeBrush cream over the buns the moment they leave the oven and dust or sprinkle sugar on while the surface is still wet. Done cold, it will not set.
- YieldAround 10 to 12 buns from a pound of dough.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and handed out to buyers of Five Roses flour, which is why nearly every page opens by naming the brand. Much of the book is made up of contributions solicited from Canadian housewives, and this recipe has the unmistakable shape of a home cook's method rather than a test-kitchen one: no weights, no times, and an assumption that bread day is already underway. Enriching a piece of the week's bread dough with egg, sugar, butter and dried fruit is one of the oldest economies in European baking -- it is the same logic behind hot cross buns and Northern English tea cakes -- and it survived in North American kitchens precisely because it cost nothing but a few minutes' extra kneading. The currants themselves are dried grapes from the eastern Mediterranean, sold under the name Zante, and by the early twentieth century they were a cheap and reliable pantry staple across Canada.