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Spanish Bun (No. 1)
1 large tablespoon butter or shortening 1 cup brown sugar 2 eggs (save 1 white) 2 teaspoons cinnamon ½ cup sweet milk 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda 1¼ cups Five Roses flour.
Note.-Butter and water may be used instead of shortening and milk.
Cream butter and sugar, then add eggs, then cinnamon, flour and cream of tartar. 4 Last of all the milk in which has been dissolved the soda. Take the white of egg, beat stiff, then add brown sugar enough to sweeten. Put on top of cake and brown in oven. This cake should be baked in small bread pan. I sometimes put nutmeg on the icing. If not, I put cocoanut on top.
Despite the name this is a spiced loaf cake with a meringue top, baked in a bread pan and cut into squares or slices. A few of the measures need translating before you start.
- The leavening is the hingeCream of tartar and soda together are the old form of baking powder, and here the acid goes in with the dry ingredients while the soda is dissolved in the milk at the last moment. Once the two meet the reaction starts, so have the pan greased and the oven hot before you add the milk, and get it in the oven at once.
- A large tablespoon of butterRead this as somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce, 15 to 30 g; period tablespoons varied. It is a lean cake by modern standards, closer to an old-fashioned spice loaf than a butter cake, and it will be denser and less tender than you may expect.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk. The note offering butter and water in place of shortening and milk is given without explanation; expect a drier crumb if you take it.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a cake of this size; in a small bread pan, perhaps 8 x 4 inches, allow roughly 35 to 45 minutes for the cake itself.
- The meringue topBeating the reserved white with brown sugar gives a soft, tan-coloured meringue. Spread it on the cake once it is nearly baked through, or on the baked cake returned to the oven, and give it 10 to 15 minutes to set and colour. Put it on raw batter at the start and it will scorch long before the centre is done.
- CocoanutDesiccated or shredded coconut; unsweetened desiccated was the common form, though sweetened shredded was also sold by this date. Scatter it over the wet meringue so it sticks, and watch it, as it browns faster than the meringue does.
- YieldOne small loaf, eight to ten slices. It keeps two or three days covered, though the meringue softens after the first.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the flour, which is why so many entries carry a personal aside like the nutmeg-or-coconut choice here. "Spanish bun" is a name that travelled a long way from whatever it first described: recipes for Spanish buns appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American cookery as a rich spiced yeast dough, and by the late nineteenth century in North America the name was also attached to chemically leavened brown-sugar spice cakes baked in a pan rather than shaped into buns. Why "Spanish" is not known.