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Plain Buns (Yeast Recipes)
1 compressed yeast cake 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar teaspoonful salt ¼ cup sugar ¼ cup butter 3 cups sifted Five Roses flour.
Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk, add one and onehalf cups of flour. Beat until smooth, then add butter and sugar creamed, the rest of the flour and salt. Knead lightly, keeping dough soft. Cover and set aside in warm place, free from draft, to rise until double in bulk about one and one half hours.
Mould into small round buns, place in well-greased pans, one inch apart. Cover, set aside to rise until light-about one hour. Brush with egg, diluted with water.
Bake twenty minutes. Just before removing from the ovens, brush with sugar moistened with a little water.
A straightforward enriched white dough, sweet enough to be a tea bun but lean enough to eat with butter. The original assumes a wood or gas range and a cook who knows her own oven, so the two things you have to supply are a temperature and a yield.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Small enriched buns of this size bake at 375-400F, and twenty minutes at that heat is right for buns of about two inches. They are done when the bottoms sound hollow and the tops are deep gold.
- Compressed yeast cakeOne cake of the period was roughly 0.6 oz of fresh yeast. Substitute one 2 1/4-teaspoon packet of active dry or instant yeast. If using instant, you can skip the dissolving step and mix it straight into the first addition of flour.
- The salt is ambiguousThe line reads "teaspoonful salt" with no quantity, most likely a fraction lost in typesetting. For three cups of flour, one level teaspoon is the sensible reading.
- Scalded milkScalding was done to kill wild organisms and deactivate enzymes in raw milk. With pasteurised milk it is unnecessary. Warm the milk to about 100F and proceed.
- Keeping the dough softThis is the instruction that matters. The flour is measured by volume and three cups can vary by an ounce or more, so hold back some of the last cup. The dough should stay tacky and slack; a stiff dough gives a dry, bready bun rather than a tender one.
- The sugar washBrushing with sugar moistened with water just before the buns come out gives a thin glossy crust that sets as it cools. Do it fast, with the pan half out of the oven, or the buns will over-bake while you work.
- YieldAbout twelve to fifteen buns from three cups of flour. Spaced an inch apart they will just touch as they rise, which is what gives the soft sides.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households through the 1910s and 1920s, often given away or sold for a few cents to purchasers of the company's flour. Its purpose was to sell hard Manitoba spring wheat flour, and the recipes are built to flatter it: strong, high-protein flour handles the enrichment of butter, sugar and egg wash in a bun like this one without collapsing. Buns of this type were common in Canadian home baking of the period, sweetened and shaped small for tea. The book's recipes are terse, assuming a reader who already knew how bread behaved and needed only the proportions and the brand name.