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Yankee Buns
Sift 3 cups Five Roses flour with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar and 1 teaspoon soda. Work ¼ lb. butter into the flour.
Mix with the hands enough sweet milk to make a stiff dough. Roll ½ inch thick.
Spread with ¾ cup butter and sugar creamed together. Roll up and cut in slices ¾ inch thick. Place in well-buttered pan and bake in moderate oven.
This is a biscuit dough rolled up with a sweet butter filling — a cinnamon bun without the cinnamon or the yeast. It comes together in about ten minutes, and the main risk is overworking the dough.
- The leavening2 teaspoons cream of tartar with 1 teaspoon soda is the older, single-acting substitute for baking powder, and it acts the moment liquid hits it. Mix, roll, cut and get the pan into the oven without pausing. If you would rather use baking powder, roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons stands in for both.
- Butter weight¼ lb. butter is 1/2 cup, or one North American stick. Cut it in cold, as for biscuits, leaving it in flake-sized pieces rather than rubbing it smooth.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The word only distinguished it from sour or buttermilk, which were kept deliberately and used with soda alone.
- The filling is vague"¾ cup butter and sugar creamed together" does not say how much of each. Read as equal parts by volume — about 6 tablespoons butter to 6 tablespoons brown or white sugar — it makes ¾ cup of spreadable paste, stiff enough to stay in the rolls; a higher proportion of butter is likelier to run out into the pan.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Bake 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops are set and browned and the exposed filling at the edges has caramelized.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to a rectangle ½ inch thick, spread to within half an inch of the far edge, and roll from the long side. Cut the ¾-inch slices with a serrated knife or a length of thread so the soft dough is not crushed.
- Pan and yieldExpect about 12 buns from 3 cups of flour. Set them cut side up in a buttered 9-inch square or round pan, just touching, so they rise into each other and stay tender at the sides.
- Eat them the same dayChemically leavened dough has none of the keeping quality of a yeast bun. These are best within a few hours of baking, warm.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, whose Five Roses flour was a household staple across Canada in the early twentieth century; the book was distributed cheaply with the flour and became one of the most widely owned cookbooks in the country. The name "Yankee buns" points south of the border, and the style is a familiar one: biscuit dough rolled around creamed butter and sugar, sliced and baked in a buttered pan. The recipe relies on cream of tartar and soda rather than commercial baking powder, a leavening choice characteristic of the period.