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Hot Cross Buns
Dissolve 1 yeast cake in one-half cup luke-warm water, add this to ½ cup of scalded and cooled milk, stir in enough Club House flour to make a smooth batter, cover and set in a warm place for about an hour. Then add 1 beaten egg, 1 level teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, 1-3 cup seedless raisins, 1-3 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter and flour to knead. Set again to rise to double its bulk. Then shape in round balls and place in pan about an inch apart. When light, bake and when cold, make a cross on top of each bun with frosting made of confectioner's sugar.
Mrs. George Wright. 2 C flour
A sponge-method sweet dough with almost no baking directions, which is typical of church-book recipes written for cooks who already knew how buns behaved. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the flour, and the yeast.
- The yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is replaced by one packet of active dry yeast, about 2¼ teaspoons. Dissolve it in the half cup of lukewarm water (100-110F) as written and let it stand a few minutes before combining with the milk.
- Club House flourApparently a proprietary brand name rather than a flour type. Plain all-purpose flour is a safe substitute; bread flour gives a chewier bun if you prefer it.
- 1-3 cup means one-third cupOld typesetting rendered fractions with a hyphen. So one-third cup raisins and one-third cup sugar.
- The stray "2 C flour"A note tacked on at the end, possibly a later hand recording the amount used in the sponge. Expect to use roughly 2 cups in the batter and another 1½ to 2 cups when you add the butter, egg and fruit and knead to a soft, tacky dough. Judge by feel rather than by the number.
- Scalding the milkWith raw milk this served to sanitise it, and is also said to deactivate components that weaken gluten. With pasteurized milk you can simply warm it to lukewarm, though scalding and cooling does no harm.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow. Buns this size overbake quickly and go dry.
- "When light"The shaped buns should look visibly puffed and hold a shallow dent when pressed, usually 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen. Spacing them an inch apart means they will just touch and rise into soft-sided buns.
- The frosting crossNo proportions are given. About a cup of confectioner's sugar with 4 to 5 teaspoons of milk or water gives a pipeable paste. It must go on cold buns or it will melt and slide.
- YieldDepending on how large you shape them, this dough should make somewhere between a dozen and eighteen buns.
Hot cross buns are tied to Good Friday in the English tradition, the cross generally read as a Christian mark, though the buns are often said to descend from spiced buns marked into quarters that predate the religious explanation. By the time this congregation compiled its book, the buns seem to have become a general Easter-season baking project in American households rather than a strictly Friday observance, and the cross was more often piped in confectioner's sugar icing than slashed into the dough or laid on in pastry. The recipe's reliance on a named commercial flour and a purchased yeast cake suggests something about its date: both were likely things a small-town cook of the early twentieth century bought at the grocer rather than made or milled, and contributors named brands the way they named their neighbors.