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Buns (II)
Miss Miller.
Set in the evening, a pint of milk, butter the size of an egg, three tablespoons of yeast, and flour enough to make a thick batter. Warm the milk and butter together; add the yeast and flour. In the morning add two eggs, four tablespoons of sugar, and enough flour to roll in the hand, not on the board. After mixing let it stand till quite light; then make into buns, and let them stand four hours in the pans before baking. Bake about a quarter of an hour.
A straightforward overnight sponge bun, but two things in it are period-specific: the yeast is a wet homemade barm, and the final four-hour proof belongs to that weaker leaven.
- The yeast is the hingeThree tablespoons of "yeast" means a liquid yeast — brewer's barm or a home-kept potato or hop ferment, roughly the consistency of thin batter. Modern equivalent for a pint of milk is about 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast, and you then have to shorten every rise the recipe gives.
- Four hours in the pansWith commercial yeast the shaped buns will be fully proofed in 45 to 90 minutes at room temperature; four hours will collapse them. Judge by the dough, not the clock — proofed when nearly doubled and slow to spring back from a fingertip.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books measure fat this way constantly.
- A pint of milkTwo cups in American measure. If you are working from a British edition of a similar recipe, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz and the flour will need adjusting upward.
- Flour "enough to roll in the hand"A deliberate instruction: the dough should stay soft and slightly tacky, shaped with buttered or floured hands rather than kneaded stiff on a floured board. Expect somewhere around 5 to 6 cups total across both stages, but add it by feel.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. For buns this size, 375-400F. A quarter of an hour is realistic at that heat.
- YieldDepends on how large you shape them; at two ounces apiece the batch will run to something over a dozen and a half. They are only lightly sweetened by modern standards — four tablespoons of sugar across the whole batch — so they suit butter and jam rather than standing alone as a sweet roll.
Buns of this kind sit between bread and cake, and the overnight sponge is often said to be the reason: a cook who kept her own yeast could not be sure of its strength, and it is generally supposed that she set a loose batter at night, saw whether it had worked by morning, and only then committed eggs, sugar and the rest of the flour to it. That two-stage method was widely current in American and British household baking through the nineteenth century and survives now mostly in artisan preferments. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in 1874 from contributions by named local women, is a community cookbook in the earliest sense, which is why this one carries Miss Miller's name; recipes circulated as personal property and were credited like small gifts. The absence of an oven temperature and the vagueness about flour quantity are not sloppiness but a fair description of how these cooks worked, judging heat by hand and dough by touch.