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English Bath Buns
1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 cakes compressed yeast 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 cup butter, melted 4 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 5 tablespoons sugar 4 eggs 1 cup almonds, chopped Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add butter, eggs unbeaten, flour gradually, and the salt, beating thoroughly. This mixture should be thick, but not stiff enough to handle. Cover and let rise in warm place one and one half hours, or until light. Sprinkle balance of sugar and almonds over top; mix very lightly and drop into well-greased muffin pans. Cover and let rise until light, which should be in about one half hour. Bake fifteen to twenty minutes in a moderately hot oven. These buns should be rough in appearance.
A rich, sticky yeast batter rather than a kneaded dough, which is why it is spooned into muffin pans and why the tops come out craggy. Two things need translating: the yeast and the oven.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed (fresh) yeast was usually about 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so two cakes is roughly two packets of active dry yeast, about 4 1/2 teaspoons, or about 3 1/2 teaspoons of instant. Fresh yeast is still sold in some markets in 2 oz blocks; about 1 1/4 oz of that is the equivalent.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in a book of this period means 375-400F. At the lower end you get a paler, softer bun; 400F gives the crustier top the recipe seems to want.
- The hinge: do not beat after the sugar goes inThe remaining 5 tablespoons of sugar and the almonds are folded in barely at all, on purpose. Undissolved sugar and unevenly distributed nuts are what make the surface "rough in appearance" and give the pockets of crunch; stirring them smooth produces a plain sweet muffin.
- Milk temperatureScalding is unnecessary with pasteurized milk, but the cooling matters: the milk must be lukewarm, around 100-110F, before the yeast goes in. Hotter than about 120F and the yeast suffers, and the melted butter should also be cool enough not to scald it.
- Batter consistency"Thick, but not stiff enough to handle" is accurate; expect something between a drop-cookie dough and a thick pancake batter. Resist adding flour beyond the 4 cups, since the slackness is what makes the crumb light.
- Rising timesThe 1 1/2 hours and 30 minutes assume a warm kitchen. In a modern room at 68F, allow longer and judge by volume rather than the clock; the second rise is done when the batter has visibly domed in the cups.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; with 4 cups of flour expect considerably more than one standard 12-cup pan's worth. Fill the cups about two-thirds full to leave room for the second rise.
- AlmondsThe recipe specifies only "almonds, chopped"; whether blanched or skin-on, and how coarse, is left open.
- Filed oddlyThe page sits under "Frozen Desserts" in this loose-leaf book, which is a sorting accident of the format rather than any instruction about the buns.
Bath buns take their name from the spa city of Bath in Somerset, and are generally traced to the eighteenth century, when the town's visitors ate and drank their way through the season alongside the waters; the attribution to the physician William Oliver, better known for the Bath Oliver biscuit, is traditional rather than documented. The English original is a rich enriched dough finished with crushed sugar nibs or, in older versions, caraway comfits, and its defining feature is the deliberately lumpy, uneven top. Almonds in place of caraway, and the drop-into-muffin-pan method rather than shaping by hand, look like later American adaptations of the kind found in early twentieth-century loose-leaf cook books, where an "English" recipe often means a familiar dish rewritten for a gas range, a muffin tin and standard measuring cups.