Home › Buns of All Kinds › German Buns
German Buns
4 cups Five Roses flour (sifted) 1 small teaspoon salt 1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup lard 1 egg (well beaten) Mix up with milk and water (half each) Add 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
A chemically leavened sweet bun, closer to a rich scone than to a yeast roll. The original assumes you already know how buns are handled, so most of the technique has to be read between the lines.
- The hinge: leaven goes in dryThe leaven: soda and cream of tartar are listed last, but the usual handling in books of this kind was to sift them into the flour before any liquid touched it. Because cream of tartar reacts on contact with the wet dough, mix, cut and bake without pause.
- That leavening pair1 teaspoon soda with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar is the pre-packaged-baking-powder era's homemade equivalent, roughly 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder for 4 cups of flour. The cream of tartar version is single-acting: it works on contact, not in the oven.
- The unmeasured liquid"Mix up with milk and water (half each)" gives no quantity, which is genuinely ambiguous. Expect somewhere near 1 to 1¼ cups total for a soft, just-cohesive dough, but add it gradually rather than trusting a figure.
- Flour measure4 cups sifted flour is roughly 460-480 g. Five Roses was milled from Canadian hard wheat and was generally stronger than modern all-purpose, so a plain bread flour is likely the closer match if you want the original texture.
- FatThe half butter, half lard split is for flavour plus shortening power. Rub both into the dry flour with fingertips or a pastry cutter until sandy, as for biscuits, before wetting. All butter works, but the crumb comes out slightly less tender.
- Missing oven and timeNone is given. Buns of this type bake at 400–425°F for 12–18 minutes depending on size, until well risen and browned on top.
- Yield and shapingThe batch is large: roughly 18 to 24 buns. Drop in spoonfuls or pat the dough about ¾ inch thick and cut with a round cutter, spacing them close so the sides steam soft.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar in 4 cups of flour is generous by scone standards and will brown fast. Watch the bottoms and eat these the day they are made, as soda-raised buns stale quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian households in the early twentieth century, compiled largely from recipes submitted by women who baked with the company's flour. "German buns" in such collections probably rarely points to a specific German original; the label seems to have been applied loosely in North America to enriched, sugared bun doughs of Central European character, and by this date the name may well have drifted far from any single source. What the recipe really documents is that many cooks still bought soda and cream of tartar separately and combined them themselves, a practice that faded as commercial baking powder became universal. The terse, ingredient-list style, with no oven temperature and no baking time, assumes a reader who judged both by the feel of her own range.