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Flour (Add one-half sugar and salt)
Add one-half sugar and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and one and one-half cups flour; cover, and let rise until light; add butter, remaining sugar, raisins, lemon, and flour to make a dough; let rise, shape like biscuits, let rise again, and bake. If wanted glazed, brush over with beaten egg before baking. 1 cup scalded milk 1/4 cup sugar 2 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt
This is a sponge-method sweet bun — essentially a raisin-and-lemon roll — and the ingredient list as printed is incomplete, giving only the milk, sugar, butter and salt. The yeast, flour, raisins and lemon appear in the method but without quantities, so some judgement is required.
- The missing amountsOnly the milk, sugar, butter and salt are quantified. Working from comparable sweet-dough recipes of the period, the whole batch is built on 1 cup of milk and will take roughly 3 to 3½ cups of flour in total (the 1½ cups in the sponge plus the rest), about ¾ cup raisins and the grated rind of one lemon. Treat these as reconstructions, not the book's own figures.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of this period was usually a compressed fresh cake, commonly around ½ to ⅗ oz, though sizes varied by maker. One packet of active dry or instant yeast, 2¼ teaspoons, is a workable substitute. "Dissolved" means slaked in a little of the lukewarm milk or warm water first.
- Scalded milk, and why it still mattersThe milk is scalded then cooled to lukewarm — under about 110F — before the yeast goes in. Adding yeast to milk still hot from the pan will kill it.
- "Let rise until light"For the sponge stage this means visibly puffed, bubbled and roughly doubled, 45 minutes to an hour in a warm room. The sponge is what gives the enriched dough its lift; butter, sugar and fruit all slow fermentation, which is why they are held back.
- Adding the fruitThe recipe adds the raisins and lemon along with the butter, sugar and flour when the dough is made. Working them in towards the end of kneading instead is a common modern preference, on the grounds that early kneading breaks up the fruit and streaks the crumb.
- Shaping and the second rise"Shape like biscuits" is best read as small round rolls of roughly biscuit size, rather than dough rolled and cut. Set them apart on the sheet, cover, and let them rise until swollen and slow to spring back when pressed, 30 to 45 minutes.
- OvenThe book gives none. Enriched, sugared buns of this size bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, until deep gold. Higher and the sugar and egg wash scorch before the centres set.
- The egg glazeBeaten egg brushed on just before baking gives the dark shine. Brush lightly and avoid pooling at the base, where it glues the buns to the sheet.
- YieldAbout a dozen buns. Best the day they are baked; they stale quickly and are better reheated than kept.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published under Fannie Farmer's name in 1896, is remembered for level measurements, which makes a page like this — a method with half its quantities missing — a reminder that the book was still built on older, more elastic recipe habits. The dish itself is a plain enriched bun of the kind that filled the bread chapter of every late nineteenth-century American manual: milk, butter, sugar, raisins and a little lemon rind, raised in two stages on a sponge, a method long used with any weak or uncertain ferment. Compressed yeast cakes, then sold by the grocer, were highly perishable and a relatively recent domestic convenience; before them a cook kept her own liquid yeast or salt-rising ferment, and a bun like this was a good deal less certain. The sponge method survives here as a hedge, giving the yeast a rich but unencumbered start before the fat and fruit go in.