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Light Tea Buns
One pound of flour, half a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda and an equal amount of tartaric acid should be placed together in a bowl, mixed thoroughly and then rubbed through a sieve; then rub in a couple of ounces of butter, until it is quite absorbed, add a little sugar and a quarter of a pound of currants. well washed and dried, a teaspoonful of caraway seed, and then beat an egg into a pint of milk, mix the flour into it. Butter some baking-tins, place the dough on them in small lumps, and bake in a hot oven.
A plain English tea bun in the old style: chemical leavening mixed up from scratch, currants and caraway, and a soft dough dropped in lumps rather than shaped. A few of the quantities need translating before you start.
- Work fast once the milk goes inBicarbonate of soda and tartaric acid are inert while dry but react the instant they are wet, and tartaric acid is faster than cream of tartar. Have the tins buttered and the oven up to heat before you add the egg and milk, then get the buns in immediately.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'hot' is usually read as somewhere around 425F. Small buns of this size should need roughly 12 to 15 minutes; they are done when the tops are set and lightly coloured.
- One pound of flourAbout 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, measured by scooping and levelling. Weighing it at 450 g is more reliable.
- The leavening is light by modern standardsHalf a teaspoon each of soda and acid per pound of flour is a modest lift by present-day proportions. If you want a taller bun, doubling both in equal proportion keeps the ratio the recipe sets.
- Tartaric acid and its substitutePowdered tartaric acid is still sold for brewing and confectionery. Cream of tartar is the usual stand-in but is weaker acid for acid; use roughly twice as much, and expect a slower reaction.
- A pint of milkTwo cups if you read it as American, twenty fluid ounces if English. Either way, with a pound of flour even two cups gives a slack, spoonable dough rather than anything you could knead. Hold back a little milk and add it only if the mixture is too stiff to drop.
- Currants, and "a little sugar"Dried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. The sugar is left unspecified; 2 to 3 tablespoons suits a bun of this kind rather than a cake.
- YieldTablespoon-sized lumps spaced an inch apart will give a large batch, three dozen or more from these quantities. They are best the day they are baked and go dry quickly.
Tea buns like these belong to the British baking tradition, and the caraway marks them clearly: seed cake and caraway buns were standard tea-table fare in nineteenth-century England long before the flavour fell out of fashion in American baking. The leavening is worth noting, though it dates the recipe only loosely, since home-mixed soda and acid persisted alongside the commercial product. Rather than call for a can of baking powder, Oscar's kitchen still mixed its own from soda and tartaric acid, sifting the two through with the flour to distribute them; commercial baking powder was widely available by the 1890s. The instruction to place the dough "in small lumps" is also telling. These are drop buns, closer to a scone than to a yeast roll.