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Hot Cross Buns
Add to a quart of warmed new milk half a pound of flour, a couple of eggs, and dissolve in it two ounces of German yeast. Stir this mixture well together, cover over the pan and set it in a warm place to rise. After it has risen and again fallen mix with it four pounds of flour previously rubbed with a pound of butter, a half pound more of the sugar and half an ounce of mixed spice, using enough flour to make a stiff dough; then set it once again in a warm place to rise, having it well covered with a cloth. When it has risen to nearly double its original proportions shape with the hands into balls and place them on a buttered baking-tin, leaving space enough between them to prevent their becoming joined. Set them one side for a few minutes and then cut across on the tops in the shape of a cross, brush over with a little milk and again set to one side. After the lapse of a few minutes more place in a hot oven and bake. When they are done brush the tops with milk, and serve.
A full bakery-scale sponge dough: roughly four and a half pounds of flour and a quart of milk. Halve or quarter it unless you want three dozen buns.
- Scale and yieldAs written this makes roughly three to four dozen buns of about 3 oz each. A quarter batch — 1 lb 2 oz flour total, 1 cup milk, 1 egg (rounded up from half), 4 oz butter — fits a home mixer and one sheet pan.
- German yeast"German yeast" is fresh compressed cake yeast. Two ounces of it corresponds to about 3 tablespoons of active dry or 2 tablespoons of instant yeast for the full batch; scale down proportionally. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, and "warmed" means blood temperature, not hot.
- The sugarThe recipe says "a half pound more of the sugar" although no sugar was specified earlier — apparently something has dropped out of the text. Half a pound for four and a half pounds of flour reads lean by modern taste; 8 to 10 oz gives a bun most people would recognise.
- Mixed spiceHalf an ounce of English mixed spice: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, a little clove and coriander, sometimes ginger. Pumpkin pie spice is the nearest supermarket substitute. Note that there is no dried fruit here at all, which is unusual — currants or mixed peel, about a pound for the full batch, would not be out of place.
- OvenA "hot oven" in a book of this date is conventionally read as around 425–450°F; the text itself gives no temperatures. For a dough this rich, 400°F for 15–18 minutes is safer; the butter and sugar will colour the tops fast. Buns are done at an internal 190°F.
- The crossCutting the cross with a knife, as instructed, gives a shallow mark that largely closes in the oven. If you want the crisp white cross, pipe a paste of flour and water over the risen buns just before baking — that is later practice, not Oscar's.
- The two restsThe brief "set them one side" pauses between shaping, cutting and glazing are the final proof. Give the shaped buns 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature until they spring back slowly, or they will bake dense.
- Milk glazeBrushing with milk again after baking sets a soft matte sheen. A sugar-and-milk syrup brushed on hot buns gives the sticky gloss most bakers expect today.
Hot cross buns belong to Good Friday in the English baking calendar, and the spiced yeast bun marked with a cross is generally traced to that observance rather than to any single baker. A London ordinance of 1592 restricting the sale of spice bread to burials, Christmas and Good Friday is often cited as the reason the buns became a once-a-year item; the street cry itself is documented by the eighteenth century, in the "one a penny, two a penny" rhyme printed in Poor Robin's Almanack. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, not its chef, and his 1896 book gathers the working formulas of the hotel's departments — which is why this one is written at bakery scale, in the shorthand of a man who assumed a professional bread oven and a bench big enough for four pounds of flour. The absence of currants marks it as a plain spiced bun of the older sort, the fruit being a later expectation.