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Buns (Miss Duckworth Rub lb of fresh)
Buns. (Miss Duckworth.) Rub ½ lb. of fresh butter into 2 lbs. of flour, add a little salt, mix with a little warm milk and 1 oz. yeast. Do not mix too much or they will spread and not rise well. Let it stand to rise, then add ½ lb. of sifted loaf sugar, ½ lb. of currants picked and washed, chopped candied lemon peel and citron peel. Add 3 fresh eggs well beaten up, with as much tepid milk as will make the dough the consistency of a plum-pudding. Mix all together and let it rise again before baking. Use oval fluted tins, well buttered, for these buns.
Beechwood "Bath Buns."
Let the oven be hot, or the mixture will run.
These buns take only 2 hours to rise.
Dough mixture same as Birk Hall buns, allowed to rise 1 hour; but use more butter, ³¼ lb. is not too much, with 1 lb. of pounded sugar, and 6 new-laid eggs one after another instead of 5; to these add the dough, and work well up, letting it rise a second hour before the fire. Then put with a spoon on to the baking sheet (2 large tablespoonfuls make 1 bun); egg the tops, adding rather coarsely pounded white sugar, chopped candied citron peel, and carraway comfits outside. Bake on a sheet, not in tins.
Two related entries run together here: Miss Duckworth's enriched currant buns baked in tins, and a Bath bun variant from Beechwood that refers back to a "Birk Hall" dough given elsewhere in the book. Read the first as the working recipe and the second as a set of amendments to it.
- The hinge: keep the dough slack and handle it littleThe recipe's warning not to "mix too much" says only that the buns will otherwise spread and fail to rise. Mix to a cohesive, soft mass and stop; the second rise, after the fruit and eggs go in, is where much of the lift comes from.
- Yeast quantity1 oz of the fresh compressed yeast of the period is roughly 2 sachets (about 14 g) of active dry, or about 10 g of instant. That is a generous amount, appropriate to a dough this rich, where fat and sugar both slow fermentation.
- Loaf and pounded sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. "Sifted loaf sugar" is ordinary caster or granulated sugar; "pounded sugar" the same, crushed. The "rather coarsely pounded white sugar" scattered on the Bath buns is closest on a modern shelf to nib or pearl sugar.
- Caraway comfitsCaraway seeds coated in hard white sugar, once a staple of the confectioner's counter and now sold mainly as sugared aniseed or by specialist suppliers. Sugar-coated fennel seeds are the nearest thing on a modern shelf; plain caraway seeds tossed in the coarse sugar give the flavour without the shell.
- Oven heat"Let the oven be hot" is usually rendered as somewhere around 425F/220C for the spooned Bath buns, which need to set fast before the butter runs. No heat or baking time is given for the tinned buns.
- "The consistency of a plum-pudding"A thick, spoonable dough rather than a kneadable one - it should drop reluctantly from a spoon, not pour. The Bath buns, which follow the Birk Hall dough rather than this one, are likewise dropped in two-tablespoon lumps onto a sheet rather than shaped by hand.
- Oval fluted tinsSmall individual moulds, of the sort now sold as barquette or oval brioche tins. Muffin tins or paper cases work; butter them well, as the sugar content makes these buns stick.
- Citron peelCandied citron is the thick white peel of the citron fruit, firmer and less perfumed than candied orange. Mixed candied peel is an acceptable substitute, though the texture is softer.
- Yield2 lb of flour with this weight of butter, sugar and fruit gives roughly 24 to 30 buns depending on the tin. Best eaten the day they are baked; they stale quickly despite the butter.
Lady Clark's manuscript collection, published in 1909 after her death, is a record of dishes gathered from cooks, friends and the kitchens of the houses she knew, and the attributions are half the interest: Miss Duckworth, Beechwood and Birk Hall are people and places rather than culinary authorities. Bath buns are generally traced to the spa town in the eighteenth century, and by the Victorian period the defining features were fixed - a very rich yeasted dough, dropped rather than shaped, and finished with crushed sugar on top. The caraway comfits point to an older English sweet tooth: seed cakes and sugared caraway were standard festive baking well into the nineteenth century before the taste faded. The instruction to let the dough rise "before the fire" is a reminder that these kitchens had no reliably warm, draught-free corner other than the hearth.