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One Egg (Gill of Milk)
One gill of Milk.
Cream the butter and sugar well together; add the milk and egg by degrees, also the flour and the cocoanut, mix well, shape into buns, and bake twenty minutes. This quantity will make twentyfour buns.
This is a coconut bun mixture, and as printed it is a fragment: only the milk is quantified, the rest of the ingredient list having been carried over from a heading or a preceding recipe. Read the points below before deciding how much of anything to weigh out.
- A gillIn a British cookery book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 150 ml. American books of the same period use 4 fl oz, so the difference matters if you are scaling.
- The missing quantitiesButter, sugar, flour and coconut are all named in the method but never measured. Nothing in the text allows an honest reconstruction; for a batch of twenty-four small buns a typical rubbed or creamed bun mixture of the period runs to roughly a pound of flour with half its weight in butter and sugar, but that is a general pattern, not this recipe.
- CocoanutDesiccated coconut, sold dried and finely shredded and unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is wetter and much sweeter and will change both the crumb and the browning.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the text. Buns of this size are generally baked in a hot oven, and something in the region of 400F would suit the stated twenty minutes; much lower and they would need longer. This is a modern inference, not the book's instruction.
- Adding egg and milk by degreesThis is the hinge of the method. A creamed butter-and-sugar base curdles if cold liquid goes in at once, and a curdled mixture bakes heavy. Have the egg and milk at room temperature and beat in a spoonful at a time, adding a little of the flour if it looks like separating.
- Shape into bunsTwenty-four buns from one egg and a gill of milk means small ones, perhaps two inches across. Space them well on the tray.
- RaisingNo leavening is mentioned. Many creamed bun mixtures of this period used baking powder, and self-raising flour was on sale in Britain by then, so a strict plain-flour reading of the fragment is likely to give a dense result.
Coconut buns belong to the later nineteenth century, when desiccated coconut became a cheap and widely available grocery item in Britain and turned up in everything from macaroons to cake fillings. Before that, coconut in a domestic kitchen meant grating the flesh of a whole nut, a job few households would undertake for two dozen buns. The truncated ingredient list here is consistent with a run of recipes sharing a printed heading, only the variation being set out in full, though nothing on the page confirms how the omission arose.