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Hot Cross Buns
1½ yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water ¾ teaspoon cinnamon 3 cups flour 1 egg 1/4 cup raisins stoned and quartered, or 1/4 cup currants Add butter, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake, flour, cinnamon, and egg well beaten; when thoroughly mixed, add raisins, cover, and let rise over night. In morning, shape in forms of large biscuits, place in pan one inch apart, let rise, brush over with beaten egg, and bake twenty minutes; cool, and with ornamental frost ing make a cross on top of each bun. 1 cup scalded milk
The text as printed here is scrambled — the ingredient list has been broken up by the typesetting and several quantities are missing entirely. Read the method first, then fill in the gaps below.
- What the list is missingThe method calls for butter, sugar, and salt added to the milk, but no amounts survive in this printing. A sweet overnight dough of this size would take roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon salt to the cup of scalded milk. Treat those as reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Typographical oddities"34 teaspoon cinnamon" is 3/4 teaspoon; the fraction bar dropped out. The stray "1 cup scalded milk" at the end belongs at the head of the ingredient list.
- Yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of the period was around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied. One and a half cakes is roughly 0.9 oz fresh, or about one standard packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast. This is a generous amount for a dough that is enriched and slow-risen.
- Scalding the milkScalding is generally explained as denaturing whey proteins in raw milk that would otherwise weaken gluten. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, but do warm it to blood heat with the butter so the fat softens, then cool to lukewarm before the yeast goes in — hot milk kills it.
- Overnight rise"Let rise over night" assumes an unheated kitchen. In a modern 70F room the dough will overproof and go sour by morning; give it an hour at room temperature and then refrigerate it overnight, and let the shaped buns come back to warmth before the second rise.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Enriched buns of this size bake at 375F for the twenty minutes stated; check for an internal temperature of about 190F if you are unsure.
- The crossThe frosting cross goes on cooled buns, as the recipe says — piped warm it will slide off and soak in. A stiff confectioners' sugar icing, barely loose enough to pipe, holds its edges.
- YieldThree cups of flour gives about a dozen buns the size of large biscuits. Spacing them an inch apart lets them touch as they rise, which keeps the sides soft.
Hot cross buns belong to Good Friday, and the spiced, fruited, cross-marked bun is generally traced in England to at least the eighteenth century, when street criers sold them on the morning itself; the familiar rhyme dates from that trade. Their appearance in a Boston cooking-school text is a sign of how thoroughly the domestic-science movement absorbed English baking into the American calendar — Fannie Farmer's book treats the bun as simply another entry in the yeast-bread chapter, with the religious occasion left unmentioned and the cross reduced to a piped line of icing rather than the cut or slashed cross of older English practice. The overnight rise is the older method too, made for a household that set dough before bed and baked before breakfast.