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Buns
Mix half a pound each of butter and sugar with three pounds of sifted flour, rubbing them together thoroughly, and add a pound of currants washed and dried, some caraway seed and three ounces of yeast and set the paste to rise for half an hour. Mix well and let the dough stand again until it is well risen; then roll out and shape into small cakes, place these on greased baking-sheets in a hot oven, and bake until done.
A terse professional note rather than a domestic recipe: Oscar assumes his reader knows how an enriched yeast dough behaves and gives only proportions. Two things are missing outright, and both matter.
- The liquid is missingThree pounds of flour cannot be brought to a dough with butter and sugar alone. Something on the order of 1 1/2 pints (about 3 cups) of warm milk or milk and water would be needed, and most versions of this dough also carry a little salt and an egg or two; the original says nothing about any of it, so add the liquid gradually until you have a soft, slightly tacky dough.
- YeastThree ounces means compressed fresh yeast, sold in blocks by 1896. That converts to roughly an ounce, about three tablespoons, of instant dry yeast for this quantity of flour -- a heavily yeasted dough meant to move quickly.
- "Set the paste to rise for half an hour"The half hour is a sponge or first rise, not the whole fermentation. The second rise, "until it is well risen," is the one that determines texture; expect 45 minutes to an hour in a warm room, and give the shaped buns another 20 to 30 minutes on the sheets before they go in.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot oven' is conventionally read today as about 400 to 425F. Small buns of this size take 12 to 18 minutes; they are done when the bottoms are firm and the tops deep gold.
- Rubbing the fat inButter and sugar rubbed into the flour before liquid is added, rather than creamed or added later, gives a short, cakey crumb closer to a rock cake than a modern brioche-style bun. Keep the butter cool and work it to fine crumbs.
- Currants and carawayCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. 'Some caraway seed' is left to the cook; a cautious modern reading would be one to two teaspoons for this batch, though period seeded doughs were often more heavily flavoured.
- Scale and yieldThree pounds of flour is a hotel batch and will give roughly four dozen two-inch buns. Halving or quartering the whole recipe works without adjustment.
- FinishingA sugar-and-milk wash brushed on straight from the oven was a common period treatment for buns of this sort. The recipe omits any glaze.
Buns of this kind sit squarely in the English tradition that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale: flour, butter, sugar, currants, yeast, and caraway, the last a flavouring far more common in nineteenth-century baking than it is now, when it survives mainly in rye bread and seed cake. Oscar Tschirky was not a baker but the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 volume gathers the working formulas of the hotel's departments alongside domestic recipes, which is why the proportions are given by the pound and the instructions assume a professional hand at the bench. The absence of stated liquid, salt, and timing is characteristic of trade formulas of the period, where the quantities that varied with flour and weather were left to the man mixing; the currants, meanwhile, are Zante currants imported dried from Greece, a staple of the Victorian pantry cheap enough to appear by the pound.