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English Bath Buns
2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 1/2 cup butter, melted 4 eggs 4 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 5 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 cup almonds, chopped Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in 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.
An enriched, batter-thick yeast dough dropped into muffin pans rather than shaped by hand. The proportions work as written; only the yeast and the oven need translating.
- The yeastTwo Fleischmann's cakes were fresh compressed yeast, roughly 0.6 oz each. Substitute about 4 1/2 teaspoons (two envelopes) of active dry or instant yeast. That is a generous dose by modern standards, and the rise is correspondingly short — though the recipe's own test is "until light," not the clock.
- "Moderately hot oven"Roughly 375-400F. At 15 to 20 minutes the buns should be deep gold and cooked through at the centre.
- Milk temperature"Scalded and cooled" means brought just below a boil, then let down to lukewarm — no warmer than about 110F, or the yeast suffers. Scalding was standard practice with unpasteurised milk and is no longer necessary, but warming the milk still helps the dough start.
- Consistency is the hinge"Thick, but not stiff enough to handle" is exact and worth respecting. This is a spoonable batter dough, not a kneadable one; adding flour until it handles like bread dough will give you dense, smooth muffins instead of the intended rough, craggy buns.
- Fold the sugar in lightlyThe last five tablespoons of sugar and the almonds go in after the first rise with barely any mixing, as the recipe directs. Pockets of undissolved sugar survive into the bake and give sticky patches; overmixing here deflates the dough.
- AlmondsThe recipe specifies only chopped almonds; blanched or natural will both work. Scattering some on top before baking is an optional addition.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number; expect somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 standard muffin cups. Fill them roughly two-thirds.
- Best the day they are madeAn egg- and butter-rich dough with no preservative goes stale quickly. Eat warm, or split and toast the next day.
Bath buns take their name from Bath in Somerset, where sweet, rich yeast buns were being sold by the eighteenth century, as was that city's other baking export, the Sally Lunn. The traditional finish is crushed or coarse sugar scattered over a deliberately untidy top — caraway comfits also appear in some accounts of the older form — which is what the instruction "these buns should be rough in appearance" is protecting. This version's almonds and its naming of Fleischmann's Yeast place it in the American branded-yeast literature of the period.