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Graham Buns
2 cups graham flour 2 cups Five Roses flour ¾ cup sugar ¾ cup lard and butter 1 cup currants 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt Sweet milk.
Mix with sweet milk, roll and cut out.
Bake as usual.
A community-contributed formula written for cooks who already knew what a bun looked like: this is a rolled and cut dough, closer to a sweet biscuit or currant scone than to a yeasted bun. The liquid quantity is left entirely to your judgement, which is the one real difficulty.
- The milk is unmeasured"Mix with sweet milk" means add just enough to bring the crumbed fat and flour into a soft, rollable dough — expect somewhere between 1 and 1¼ cups, but add it in stages. Graham flour drinks more liquid than white, and the dough should stay soft enough to cut but firm enough to lift.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk. The distinction mattered when sour milk and buttermilk were kept deliberately for baking, and when the acid in them determined whether you used soda alone or soda with cream of tartar.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder, in roughly the classic 2:1 ratio. Two teaspoons cream of tartar plus one of soda is equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Mix and bake promptly — this leavening reacts as soon as it is wet.
- Five Roses flourThe brand of the milling company that published the book; a white household flour. Plain all-purpose flour is the substitute.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran and germ returned, milled a little differently from modern stone-ground whole wheat but interchangeable with it here.
- Lard and butter¾ cup of the two combined, in whatever proportion the cook had — half and half gives flakiness from the lard and flavour from the butter. Cut it into the dry ingredients cold, as for pastry.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Toss them in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink or clump.
- Bake as usualThe book gives no oven guidance at all. For a rolled bun of this kind a hot oven, in the region of 400–425F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly browned, is a reasonable modern reading. Roll about 3/4 inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cutter.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes a large batch, roughly two dozen or more buns depending on how thick you roll and how large you cut. They are best the day they are baked.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses brand, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why so many entries, like this one, assume knowledge the writer had and the reader was expected to share ("bake as usual"). Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached unbolted whole-meal bread against the refined white flour of commercial bakers; by the time this book appeared the term had long since detached from his movement and simply meant coarse whole wheat on a grocer's shelf. The pairing of graham with an equal measure of white flour, plus sugar, fat and currants, is the practical compromise of a period that accepted whole grain as wholesome but had no intention of giving up a tender crumb.