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Break one egg into a cup and fill with sweet milk; mix with it half cup yeast, half cup butter, one cup sugar, enough flour to make a soft dough; flavor with nutmeg. Let rise till very light, then mold into biscuit with a few currants. Let rise a second time in pan; bake, and, when nearly done, glaze with a little molasses and milk. Use the same cup, no matter about the size, for each measure.-Mrs.
W. A. James.
A plain enriched roll dough of the sort that assumes a jar of liquid yeast on the shelf and a cook who judges flour by feel. Two conversions carry the whole recipe: the yeast and the flour.
- The half cup of yeastThis is liquid yeast — a homemade barm or a bottled potato-water ferment, mostly water by volume. Use 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast and add about 1/2 cup more milk to replace the lost liquid, or use 1/2 cup of a lively sourdough starter and accept a longer, tangier rise.
- "Use the same cup"The note is the recipe's real instruction: everything is proportional. One egg plus milk to fill the cup, then equal cups of yeast and butter at half measure, one cup sugar. With a standard 8 oz cup that comes to roughly 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup sugar, and you will need about 3 1/2 to 4 cups flour for a soft dough.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabber that recipes of the period often called for. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Mold into biscuitNineteenth-century American usage: shape into individual rolls about the size of a biscuit, not into a sheet to be cut. Two to three ounces of dough each gives about fifteen buns.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black ones. Two-thirds of a cup is ample for this quantity; toss them in a little of the flour so they do not sink or scorch.
- Rising times"Very light" means roughly doubled and slack to the touch — 1 to 1 1/2 hours in a warm kitchen for packaged yeast, considerably longer for a starter. The shaped buns need another 45 minutes in the pan.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all; bake at about 375F for 15 to 20 minutes. Sugar and molasses both brown fast, so watch the bottoms.
- The glazeBrush on a thin mixture of molasses and milk; the recipe gives no proportions, so about one part molasses to two of milk is a reasonable starting point. The recipe's 'when nearly done' means the last few minutes only; applied earlier it burns, and the point is gloss and a faint bitterness against the sugar.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon, freshly grated, is in keeping with the period. It is the only spice here and should be assertive enough to notice.
Buns of this kind — a sweet, buttery, egg-enriched yeast dough studded with currants and glazed dark on top — descend from the English spiced bun tradition. The recipe's most telling detail is the half cup of yeast, measured as a liquid: compressed cake yeast was only becoming widely available in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many households still kept a homemade barm going, fed with potato water or hops. The proportional "use the same cup" instruction is equally of its time, a practical accommodation to kitchens where a matched set of graduated measures was not to be assumed. Like other entries in The Dixie Cook Book, this one is credited to a contributor by name, the compiled-community format that became increasingly common in American cookbook publishing from the 1870s onward.