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Buns
1 cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 2 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 yeast cake 1/4 cup warm water Make a sponge of these ingredients. Beat thoroughly, and when light, add flour to make a soft dough, but one which will not stick to the board. Knead, and let it rise until it is twice its original size; then add:-- 1/2 cup butter softened 1/2 cup currants 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg Let it rise until light, then shape into small round cakes, and place them in a buttered pan; when light, bake in a moderate oven forty minutes. When the cakes have baked for fifteen minutes, glaze with a mixture of milk and sugar, 1 tablespoon sugar, one-quarter cup of milk, and repeat this every five minutes.
If desired, the currants and spices may be omitted.
A three-stage sweet dough: a wet sponge, a first rise, then butter, fruit and spice worked in. The old quantities translate cleanly except for the yeast and the baking time.
- The yeastA yeast cake of this era was normally compressed fresh yeast; sizes varied, but around 0.6 oz is a common reckoning, which would make a quarter of one roughly 1/2 teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast. Dissolve it in the 1/4 cup warm water as written.
- Scald the milkMany period bread recipes call for scalded milk, though this one does not. With pasteurised milk there is no need for it; either way the milk must be no warmer than lukewarm when it meets the yeast.
- The sponge stageSponge means a thin batter, not a dough — 1 cup milk to 2 cups flour will be loose. "When light" is the cue: it should be domed, bubbling and smelling faintly of beer, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours at room temperature.
- Adding butter after the first riseThis is the hinge. Half a cup of softened butter will slacken a risen dough badly and it looks broken for several minutes. Keep kneading until it comes back together and is smooth before shaping, and expect the last rise to be slower than the first because the fat and sugar both retard the yeast.
- CurrantsZante currants — small dried grapes — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Soak briefly in warm water and pat dry if they are hard, or they will pull moisture from the crumb.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is usually read as about 350F. Forty minutes seems long for small buns at that heat; 18 to 22 minutes should suit buns the size of a golf ball, and they are done when the bottoms are browned and the centres read about 190F. The longer time may reflect an oven whose 'moderate' ran cooler and a door opened repeatedly for glazing.
- The glazeOne tablespoon sugar stirred into 1/4 cup milk, brushed on partway through baking and again as it dries, gives the thin lacquered top of an old-fashioned bun. Adjust the schedule to your actual bake time — two or three coats in the second half is plenty.
- YieldUnstated in the original, and the flour added to the sponge is unmeasured. Reckoning on roughly 4 cups of flour in total, expect something in the region of 12 to 15 buns.
Buns of this kind — an enriched sponge dough with currants and warm spice — belong to the British spiced bun tradition that also produced the hot cross bun, and similar recipes appear in American household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under names like tea buns, currant buns and Bath buns.