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Buns (Two coffee-cups bread dough)
Two coffee-cups bread dough, two eggs, one cup sugar, spices, a few currants. Mould like rusk and let them rise before baking.
This is a scrap-dough recipe of the kind that assumes a bread day already in progress: you steal risen dough from the batch and enrich it into something sweet. The proportions are workable, but almost everything about method is left to the cook.
- The coffee-cupNineteenth-century coffee cups were not a standardised measure, and period estimates vary from something smaller than a modern 8 oz cup to roughly a half-pint. Two of them is somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of risen dough by volume, call it three-quarters of a pound.
- What "bread dough" means herePresumably risen, kneaded white bread dough, taken after the first rise and before shaping. Straight doughs of the period were often little more than flour, water, salt and yeast, with little or no fat, so the dough contributes structure and the eggs and sugar do the enriching.
- Working the eggs and sugar inTwo eggs and a cup of sugar into a lump of stiff dough this size is a substantial change in hydration, and the dough will go slack and sticky before it comes together. Work it in a stand mixer with the dough hook, or expect ten minutes of messy hand kneading with a little extra flour.
- SpicesUnspecified, as was normal when every kitchen had its own habit. Cinnamon, nutmeg and mace are the period-appropriate choices; a teaspoon of cinnamon plus half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg suits this quantity.
- No fat listedThe recipe omits butter entirely, which will give a drier, more bread-like bun than a modern reader expects. Two to three tablespoons of softened butter kneaded in with the eggs brings it closer to a contemporary sweet roll without altering the character.
- "Mould like rusk"Rusks of this period were commonly shaped as small round rolls set close together in the pan, so they rose into each other and had soft sides. Two to three inches across, just touching, in a greased tin.
- The second riseThis is the instruction that matters. Sugar and egg slow the yeast considerably, so the shaped buns may need 1 to 1 1/2 hours to become visibly puffy rather than the 30-40 minutes an unsweetened dough would take. Baking them before they are light gives dense, heavy buns.
- OvenBake at 375F for 18-22 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and a bun sounds hollow when tapped underneath. The sugar browns fast, so tent with foil if they colour before they are done.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen buns of two ounces each. They stale quickly, as fat-poor sweet dough does, and are best the day they are baked.
Buns built from a lump of the day's bread dough belong to a household economy where the oven was lit and the dough was rising whether or not anyone wanted cake. The technique has a long English lineage and survives in commercial baking as the old-dough method, where mature dough is folded into a fresh batch for flavour. The comparison to rusk is telling: rusk in this period could mean a small enriched roll, sometimes baked, split and dried a second time to keep, and the shape was familiar enough that no further description was needed. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by local women for charity, which explains the shorthand here -- currants "a few" and spices unnamed, because a recipe of this sort was written to jog the memory of someone who already knew what she was doing.