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Buns
M.
Take one large coffee-cup of warm milk, one-quarter cake of yeast and salt; make sponge; let rise; when light work into a dough, adding one-half teacup of sugar, one egg, butter twice the size of an egg; let rise; roll into a sheet; butter it; cut into strips three inches wide and six inches long; fold, not quite in the middle; let rise again and bake; when in a dough, if it rises before you are ready, push it down. Excellent.
A plain sweet yeast bun built on a sponge, with the dough rolled, buttered and folded so the halves pull apart after baking. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven heat and no time, which is where most of the work lies.
- Coffee-cup and teacupA coffee-cup is usually reckoned at roughly 1 cup (8 fl oz) and a teacup as smaller, perhaps 6 fl oz, so the half teacup of sugar comes out around 1/3 cup. The book does not define either; neither was standardised, and small variation here does no harm.
- Quarter cake of yeastCakes varied and the recipe does not say what kind. If it is a compressed cake of about 0.6 oz, a quarter is roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons fresh yeast, or a scant 1/2 teaspoon instant dry yeast. The small amount suits a slow sponge rather than a fast rise.
- Flour is not givenThis is genuinely unspecified. For 1 cup of milk expect somewhere near 3 to 3 1/2 cups of flour by the time the dough is workable, but the recipe assumes a cook who adds until the feel is right. Make the sponge loose, like thick batter, then work in flour for the dough.
- Butter twice the size of an eggAn egg's bulk of butter was reckoned at about 2 oz, so twice that is about 4 oz, or half a cup. Softened, not melted, so the dough takes it without slackening.
- SaltListed with no quantity. About 1 teaspoon for this amount of flour. Note that the recipe lists it with the milk and yeast, that is, in the sponge.
- Push it downA useful line. An over-risen sweet dough can be knocked back and left to rise again without much harm. Do it once or twice at most before shaping.
- The foldButtering the sheet before folding is what makes the bun open into two leaves, the same trick behind Parker House rolls. Folding off-centre leaves a lip that browns and keeps the top from sealing shut.
- Oven and timeBake at 375-400F for 12 to 18 minutes, until the tops are well coloured and the undersides sound hollow. The recipe itself gives no oven heat.
- YieldA sheet cut into 3 by 6 inch strips gives perhaps a dozen or so buns, but with no flour quantity or rolling thickness specified the yield can only be guessed.
The Home Cook Book was one of the earliest American community cookbooks, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women and sold for charity, which is why so many entries are signed only with an initial such as this "M." and why the instructions assume shared knowledge rather than spelling it out. The single word "Excellent" at the end appears to be the contributor vouching for her own recipe. The quarter cake of yeast may point to the commercially compressed yeast increasingly available in cities by the 1870s, though home-made dried yeast cakes were still common, and the two-stage sponge method here is older still. Buttering and folding the dough before the last rise is a technique shared with the split dinner rolls of the same period; the buns are barely sweet by modern standards, closer to a tea bread than a pastry.