Buns, Light
INGREDIENTS for 1 dozen buns. teaspoonful of tartaric acid, 1/2 teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, 1½ lb. of flour, 2 oz. of butter, 2 oz. of loaf sugar, 1/4 lb. of currants or raisins-when liked, a few caraway seeds, 1/2 pint of cold new milk, 1 egg. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Rub the tartaric acid, soda, and flour all together through a hair sieve; work the butter into the flour; add the sugar, currants, and caraway seeds, when the flavour of the latter is liked.
Mix all these ingredients well together; make a hole in the middle of the BUNS. flour, and pour in the milk, mixed with the egg, which should be well beaten; mix quickly, and set the dough, with a fork, on baking-tins, and bake the buns for about 20 minutes. This mixture makes a very good cake, and if put into a tin, should be baked 1 hour. The same quantity of flour, soda, and tartaric acid, with 1/2 pint of milk and a little salt, will make either bread or tea-cakes, if wanted quickly.
BUTTER, BROWNED.
TIME.-20 minutes for the buns; if made into a cake, 1½ hour.
A quick bun raised chemically rather than with yeast, from the era just before commercial baking powder made the household version obsolete. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her oven, so the temperatures below are the main gap to fill.
- The acid quantity is incompleteThe text reads "teaspoonful of tartaric acid" with the number dropped in printing; comparable Victorian formulas use 1 teaspoon of tartaric acid to 1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. If you would rather not guess, 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder to the pound of flour does the same job.
- Oven heatNo oven description of any kind is given. As modern guidance, small buns of this type bake well at 400-425F for the 20 minutes stated; the same mixture baked as a single cake is better at 350F.
- Conflicting cake timeThe body says bake the cake 1 hour, the time note at the end says 1 1/2 hours. Treat 1 hour at 350F as the working figure for a 1 lb-flour cake in a deep tin and test with a skewer.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of milk here is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 1 1/4 US cups. A pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; weighing is more reliable.
- Loaf sugar and new milkLoaf sugar was cut or crushed from a hard cone; use granulated. "New milk" simply means fresh whole milk, not skimmed or soured.
- Sieving mattersRubbing acid, soda and flour together through a fine sieve is not fussiness. Undispersed soda leaves bitter yellow flecks in the crumb, and there is no yeast stage to even it out.
- Work fastThe acid begins reacting the moment the milk goes in. Mix quickly, drop the dough onto the tins with a fork as directed, and get it into a hot oven; dough left standing goes flat.
- YieldOne dozen buns, each roughly the size of a small scone.
These are transitional buns. Yeast-raised buns dominated English baking for centuries, but by the middle of the nineteenth century cooks could buy tartaric acid and bicarbonate of soda separately and combine them at home for what Victorian books called "quick" bread and cake — the same chemistry later sold ready-mixed as baking powder. The recipe's afterthought is telling: the identical flour, soda and acid with milk and salt "will make either bread or tea-cakes, if wanted quickly", which is exactly the selling point of chemical leavening in a household with unexpected callers and no time to prove a dough. Caraway seeds, offered here as an optional flavouring, were far more common in English sweet baking then than now; seed cake was a standing tea-table fixture. The average cost of ninepence for a dozen places this among the cheap everyday items in Mrs Beeton's costings, which were compiled for mid-Victorian middle-class households keeping an eye on the weekly books.