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English Bath Buns
2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 1/2 cup butter, melted 4 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 5 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 cup almonds, chopped NEXT time you plan to give your family a genuine treat, make some English Bath Buns, using this recipe. They have the rich nutty flavor that stands for bread-enjoyment.
Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk. Add butter, eggs, unbeaten, flour gradually, and the salt, beating thoroughly. This mixture should be thick, but not stiff enough to handle. Cover and let rise in warm place one and one-half hours, or until light.
Sprinkle balance of sugar and almonds over top, mix very lightly and drop into well-greased muffin pans. Cover and let rise until light, which should be in about one-half hour.
Bake fifteen to twenty minutes in a moderately hot oven. These buns should be rough in appearance.
A rich, nearly pourable dough dropped into muffin pans rather than shaped by hand. The method is sound, but the ingredient list on this page is incomplete and that has to be settled before anything is mixed.
- The eggs are missing from the listThe directions call for “butter, eggs, unbeaten, flour gradually,” yet no eggs appear among the ingredients and no number is given anywhere on the page. The quantity cannot be recovered from the text. Half a cup of milk will not wet four cups of flour, so the eggs are carrying most of the liquid: start at three and add until the mixture is what the book asks for, thick but not stiff enough to handle.
- Two cakes in a small doughTwo cakes is about four and a half teaspoons of active dry yeast for four cups of flour, which is a great deal. It is why the first rise is only an hour and a half and the second only half an hour. A single sachet and a longer first rise gives a better-tasting bun, and the booklet had a commercial interest in the larger figure.
- Nothing here is kneadedThis dough is beaten, never turned out onto a board. The sugar and the almonds are scattered over the risen batter and folded in “very lightly,” which leaves them in streaks rather than evenly distributed. That is intended, and it is what produces the rough appearance the recipe asks for at the end.
- Grease the pans heavilyDropped batter with half a cup of melted butter in it will still catch, particularly where the sugar has streaked. Heavy greasing or paper liners, and about two-thirds full: the second rise is short, so leave room for what happens in the oven.
- Almonds instead of sugar nibsEnglish Bath buns are finished with crushed lump sugar across the top, which gives them their crunch. This version works almonds and sugar through the batter instead, for a nuttier and softer bun. Scattering coarse sugar over the tops before baking restores the original texture without changing anything the recipe says to do.
The Bath bun belongs to the English city it is named for, a West Country sweet bun distinct from the Sally Lunn that Bath also claims, and in England it is identified above all by crushed sugar on top. What reached this booklet is an American reading of the form. The sugar and the almonds are mixed in rather than crusted on, the batter is dropped into muffin pans, and the name carries the association without the technique that earned it. The copy is worth reading for its own sake: it promises a genuine treat and leans hard on the word English, which in American promotional cooking of this period worked as a claim about quality rather than a statement about origin.