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Orange Buns
10 ounces Five Roses flour ¼ pound sugar 2 ounces butter 2 ounces lard 1 teaspoon baking powder Rind of 1 orange (or lemon) Pinch of salt 1 egg Milk.
Rub the butter and lard into the flour.
Add sugar, baking powder, salt, orange rind. Mix to a stiff paste with the beaten egg and a little milk. Bake 10 minutes in a quick oven.
Strain juice of orange, add icing sugar, and ice the buns when cold.
A stiff, rubbed-in dough closer to a scone or rock cake than to a yeast bun, finished with a raw orange glace icing. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easy to reproduce accurately.
- Weights in cups10 oz flour is about 2¼ cups scooped and levelled; ¼ lb sugar is ½ cup; 2 oz each of butter and lard is 4 tablespoons each. Weighing the flour is worth the trouble here, as the dough is meant to be stiff and an extra ounce of flour will make it dry.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400–425°F. Ten minutes suits small buns of about 2 inches; they should be set and just colouring at the edges, not browned through.
- Raising powerOne teaspoon of baking powder for 10 ounces of flour is light by current standards, and period baking powders varied in strength. Two teaspoons gives a reliable lift in a dough this rich and heavy.
- The lardA mix of butter and lard was a common domestic choice for a short, tender crumb. A good rendered lard works well; all butter gives more flavour and a slightly firmer bun.
- Orange rindZest only, no white pith, and rub it into the sugar rather than the flour so the oils are drawn out. A little extra zest is no bad thing.
- How much milkThe recipe leaves the quantity open, as period recipes often did. Start with 2 tablespoons after the egg and add a teaspoon at a time until the dough just coheres — it should be too stiff to drop from a spoon.
- The icingGlace icing takes a great deal of sugar to a little juice, so expect to use only part of the strained juice of the orange, or several cups of icing sugar, until it thickens to a spreadable glace. Add the sugar to the juice, not the reverse, and only ice buns that are fully cold or the glaze will slide off.
- YieldAbout twelve buns of 2 inches, or ten larger ones. Best on the day they are made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, of Montreal and Winnipeg, and like other miller's cookbooks it existed to sell flour — the brand name appears in the ingredient lines throughout. It reflects a British-Canadian household repertoire in which "bun" covered both yeast-raised teacakes and quick chemically-leavened ones like this. The rubbing-in method with a mix of butter and lard was a common domestic practice, lard being cheap and valued for the short crumb it gave; the orange, by contrast, was the treat, imported and worth using down to the rind. Glace icing of nothing but fruit juice and icing sugar was a common finish for a plain cake.