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Scotch Black Buns
½ pound Five Roses flour 1 pound raisins 1 pound currants 1/4 pound sugar 2 ounces blanched almonds 2 ounces candied peel 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon (or spices) ¼ teaspoon Jamaica pepper ½ teaspoon carraway seeds ½ teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teacup sweet milk (old ale may be used instead).
With the hand mix well in a basin all above ingredients. Line a cake tin with a plain short crust rolled out very thin, and put the mixture in this prepared tin, and roll out the scraps of paste to cover top.
Wet well the edges. Place top cover on and press well around the edges. Prick top with a fork, and brush over with sweet milk. Bake in moderate oven for at least 3 hours. -Mrs. J. W. McKendrick, Ladysmith, Vancouver Island, B.C.
A Hogmanay fruit cake sealed inside a pastry case, written for a cook who already knew what short crust was and owned a deep tin. The proportions are sound; the oven instruction is the part that needs translating.
- The hinge: low and slow, not "moderate"Three hours at a true moderate oven (350F) will blacken the pastry long before the dense fruit centre is set. Bake at 300F and tent the top with foil once the crust has coloured; the interior only needs to reach a set, not to brown.
- Jamaica pepperThis is allspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, not peppercorns and not a blend. A quarter teaspoon ground is what is meant.
- The teacupA teacup in this period is roughly 6 fl oz, about three-quarters of a modern cup. The mixture should be stiff and barely moist, so add the last of it by eye rather than pouring it all in.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of each is a homemade baking powder, equivalent to roughly a teaspoon of the commercial kind. If you substitute, use baking powder alone and leave out both.
- The pastry is not in the ingredient listYou need enough plain short crust to line and lid a tin: roughly 12 oz flour to 6 oz fat, rolled thin. The old ale option in place of milk gives a darker, maltier crumb.
- Candied peel and currantsBuy whole candied citron or orange peel and chop it yourself if you can; the pre-diced supermarket mix is mostly sugar syrup. Currants here means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants.
- Tin and yieldA 7-inch deep round tin holds this. It gives roughly 4 lb of finished bun, cut in thin slices, and serves twenty or more.
- KeepingPrick the top well as directed so steam escapes and the lid does not lift. Wrapped in paper and stored in a tin, black bun improves for two to three weeks and was normally made well ahead of the New Year.
Black bun is the Scottish New Year cake, carried to the door by the first-foot at Hogmanay along with coal, salt and whisky. The name is generally traced to the near-black density of the fruit inside rather than to any burning; earlier versions are often said to have been baked into a Twelfth Night cake and to have migrated to Hogmanay only as Christmas observance faded in Presbyterian Scotland. The pastry case is the archaic part: encasing a rich fruit mixture in a plain crust is often explained as a way of protecting it in a fierce, unregulated oven, and the wrapping survived long after the ovens improved. That this one reaches a Canadian milling company's cookbook by way of Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, is itself a small record of Scottish emigration to the coal and timber towns of British Columbia, where a contributor's home baking was still keyed to the calendar she brought with her.