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Hot Cross Buns
2 cups scalded milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/2 cup lukewarm water 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon 6 cups of flour 2 eggs Add butter and salt to milk. When lukewarm add yeast. With sugar and eggs well 4 tbsp. butter 1 tsp. salt 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup currants beaten. Stir in flour and fruit. Let rise over night. Shape in rolls and place one inch apart. Let rise and bake about 20 minutes. Brush over with butter while hot and frost top with a cross.
— Mrs. A. R. Tattersall
The ingredient column and the method have collided in the typesetting, so read the whole entry before starting: butter, salt, raisins and currants all belong in the list, not the instructions. Nothing else about the dough is unusual.
- The garbled sentenceReassembled, the method reads: add the 4 tbsp butter and 1 tsp salt to the scalded milk; when lukewarm add the dissolved yeast, then the sugar and the two eggs well beaten; stir in the flour and fruit.
- One yeast cakeA compressed cake of the period was roughly 0.6 oz. One packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry or instant yeast substitutes for it, dissolved in the half cup of lukewarm water as written.
- Slade's cinnamonD. & L. Slade Co. was a Boston spice house of the period; any ground cinnamon does. One teaspoon in six cups of flour is restrained by modern taste, and you may prefer two, with a pinch of nutmeg or allspice.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the book assumes a range cook's judgement. Enriched buns of this size bake at 375-400F, and the stated 20 minutes fits that range.
- Rising overnightThe dough is left to rise all night, presumably in a cool room rather than a warm modern kitchen. Refrigerating it overnight is the safer modern course; a 68-70F room may over-ferment six cups of enriched dough by morning and leave it slack and sour.
- One inch apartSpaced this close the buns will likely touch as they prove, pushing against each other and rising upward, which gives the soft torn sides associated with hot cross buns; the recipe does not say whether that was the intention.
- The cross"Frost top with a cross" means a simple confectioners' sugar icing piped on after baking, not the flour-and-water paste piped on before baking that is now more common in Britain. Butter the hot buns first, then let them cool before icing or it will slide off.
- YieldSix cups of flour makes a large batch — about 24 buns. The dough halves without trouble.
Hot cross buns belong to Good Friday, and the marked cross is often said to derive from a medieval devotional practice of scoring or stamping bread, though the origin is traditional rather than documented; the association was strong enough that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London street criers sold them by the season. Their appearance in a Philathea class cookbook is not incidental: Philathea was the adult women's Bible-class movement, and these community books were compiled and sold as church fundraisers, so the calendar of the church year runs quietly through the recipes. The signed attribution to Mrs. A. R. Tattersall is the standard form of such volumes, where each contribution carried the name of the member who supplied it and her baking. The reference to Slade's cinnamon may reflect another habit of the genre: named brands often appear in such books, where local grocers and manufacturers frequently bought advertising space.