Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Breakfast Buns
Breakfast Buns
Mrs. J. W. Preston.
Two cups of flour, three-fourths cup of corn meal, three-fourths cup of butter, one-half-cup of sugar, two eggs beaten, one cup of milk, three teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder; bake in hot oven twenty minutes.
A rich cornmeal muffin batter under an older name: "bun" in nineteenth-century North American books often meant a small quick bread baked in gem pans, not a yeasted roll. The recipe assumes knowledge the modern cook has to supply — pan, method, and salt.
- Hot ovenIn books of this period a hot oven is generally taken as somewhere between 400F and 450F; 425F is a reasonable modern reading. Twenty minutes at that heat suits small buns in a gem or muffin pan.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian proprietary brand of the sort named in nineteenth-century Canadian cookbooks. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure.
- Corn mealUse a fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not degerminated cornbread mix, which already contains leavening and salt. Soaking the meal in the cup of milk for ten minutes before mixing softens the grit.
- No salt listedThe original omits it; butter of the period was commonly salted. Add half a teaspoon if using unsalted butter.
- MethodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Three-quarters of a cup of butter to two cups of flour is a very rich ratio — mix only until combined, or the buns turn tough and greasy.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffin-sized buns. Grease the pan well; there is enough butter in the batter that paper liners peel away cleanly, but the cups still stick.
Community cookbooks like The Home Cook Book — compiled in Toronto in the 1870s and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children — worked by collecting signed contributions from local women, which is why this page carries Mrs. J. W. Preston's name rather than an editor's. Her use of Cook's Friend is a small period marker: chemical baking powders were sold under competing proprietary names, and contributors named the brand they trusted the way they might have named a butcher. The mixing of cornmeal with wheat flour belongs to a North American tradition of stretching and flavouring wheat flour with maize, common on both sides of the border and older than the leavening that lifts it here.