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Spanish Buns
1/2 C butter. 1 1/2 C sugar. 3 eggs beaten 2 minutes 1 C sour milk [ix like cake and bake in muffin tins. 3/4 C shortening 1 C brown sugar 1 egg 1 C molasses 1 C hot water 2½ C flour Mrs. Guy Smock. 1 t cinnamon and cloves 1 C seedless raisins, if desired ½ t soda
The page has been jumbled in transcription: two neighboring recipes have run together into one block, and the Spanish Buns proper are only the first line and a half. Read it as a shortened list before you shop.
- Two recipes, one paragraph"3 eggs beaten 2 minutes, 1 C sour milk, mix like cake and bake in muffin tins" is the Spanish Buns entry, missing its flour, sugar, fat and leavening. The run of shortening, brown sugar, molasses, hot water, flour, spice, raisins and soda is a molasses cake or gingerbread from the adjoining column, with Mrs. Guy Smock's name floating between them.
- What is missingA Spanish bun batter of this era typically runs to about 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 to 2 1/2 cups flour and 1 teaspoon soda alongside the three eggs and cup of sour milk, with nutmeg or cinnamon. Any reconstruction is a guess; the printed page does not give those amounts.
- Sour milkClabbered raw milk is hard to come by now. A cup of buttermilk, or a cup of whole milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice and left ten minutes, behaves much the same way against soda.
- Soda quantityThe printed page was checked: the soda is a half teaspoon, as our text now gives. The rest of the batter — 2½ cups flour, 1 cup molasses, 1 cup sour milk — is leavened partly by the reaction of the molasses and sour milk.
- "1 t cinnamon and cloves"Read as a teaspoon of each, or a teaspoon of the two combined; period church books use both phrasings. Ground cloves are strong, so half a teaspoon of cloves to a full teaspoon of cinnamon is the safer reading.
- ShorteningIn a church collection of this kind this means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Butter works and tastes better, though the crumb may be slightly less tender.
- Oven and pansThe page gives no temperature or time. For muffin tins, a moderate oven of about 375F for 18 to 22 minutes, until a pick comes out clean, is a reasonable modern setting. Yield cannot be worked out from the fragment as printed.
- "Mix like cake"Cream the fat and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the sour milk, ending with dry. Get the pans into the oven promptly once the soda meets the acid.
Spanish buns appear in English and early United States cookbooks, sometimes as a yeast-raised sweet spiced loaf enriched with eggs, wine or rosewater, and elsewhere as a quick cake baked in a sheet or in small tins and often iced. Why they are called Spanish is not documented; the name is generally traced to the sweet spiced cakes associated with Spain and its colonies, but by the time this book was compiled it had become a fixed recipe title with no particular connection to the country. Their appearance here, in a Presbyterian congregation's fundraising collection from Libertyville, Illinois, is typical of the genre: contributors sent in what they actually baked, and one member's Spanish Buns is set nose to tail with somebody's molasses cake.