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Rock Buns
½ pound Five Roses flour 2 ounces sweet lard or butter 2 ounces granulated sugar 2 ounces currants 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 cup sweet milk.
Mix to a smooth batter, and drop in small spoonfuls on to a well-greased baking pan. Bake in moderately hot oven for 15 minutes or 20 minutes. Let cool in pan before breaking apart.
A plain drop bun of the sort a household kept in the tin for tea. The measurements are by weight, which is a help rather than a hindrance.
- The weights½ pound flour is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups (227 g); 2 ounces of fat is 4 tablespoons (57 g); 2 ounces sugar is a generous ¼ cup; 2 ounces currants is roughly ⅓ to ½ cup. Weighing the flour is worth doing, since a cup of milk against a badly measured cup of flour is the difference between buns and puddles.
- Sweet lard, sweet milk"Sweet" here means fresh and unsoured, not sugared. Use plain whole milk and either unsalted butter or a fresh, neutral lard; there is no soured-milk chemistry at work, which is why the leavening is baking powder rather than soda.
- Rub the fat inThe recipe says only "mix to a smooth batter," but the standard method for this style is to rub the fat into the dry ingredients until it looks like coarse meal, stir in sugar and currants, then add the milk last. Fat cut into the flour is what gives a rock bun its short, crumbly texture rather than a cake crumb.
- ConsistencyThe recipe calls for a full cup of milk to ½ pound of flour, which is a wet ratio for this style and gives a soft drop batter rather than the stiff rubbed-in dough usual for rock buns. A slacker mixture will spread more on the pan.
- Moderately hot ovenThe book gives no figure; 'moderately hot' is generally read as somewhere around 400°F. A hotter oven sets the buns quickly and helps them keep their rough shape.
- TimingFifteen minutes is usually enough for small spoonfuls, twenty for larger ones. They are done when the ridges are browned and the base is firm.
- Cooling in the panThe instruction to cool before breaking apart matters because drop buns spread and fuse at the edges. Loosen them warm if you like, but they are fragile until set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count; small spoonfuls from this quantity should give a dozen and a half or more. They stale fast, as anything with this little sugar and fat does, and are best the day they are baked.
Rock buns, or rock cakes, are a British teatime staple whose name is often said to come from their rough, boulder-like tops rather than their texture, and they travelled with British baking habits into Canadian and American kitchens. They belong to the family of quick breads that expanded rapidly after chemical baking powder became a reliable pantry item in the second half of the nineteenth century: no yeast, no rising time, and no shaping beyond dropping spoonfuls onto a pan. Their appearance in a milling company's cookbook is no accident. Five Roses was the flour brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and books like this one were published to put a named flour into the hands of home bakers, with recipes chosen to be forgiving, cheap and quick. Currants, sold dried, were a common fruit for such buns.