Home › The World's Kitchen › Buns
Buns
Half pound sifted flour, two ounces sugar, one teaspoon compressed yeast, half gill warm milk, two ounces melted butter, two ounces currants, a saltspoon salt and a saltspoon mixed spices.
Mix the flour, sugar, spices and currants. Make a hole in the centre, place in it the yeast and milk; knead the yeast and milk well, then add the butter, another half-gill of cold milk and the salt. Sharply knead with the hands until a soft dough. Divide the batter into six equal parts; work them up to egg shape. Lay them on a lightly buttered tin pastry pan: place in a warm place to raise for thirty minutes. Set them in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes. Remove to the oven door, wet the surface of each with a little milk, return them to the oven and bake for two minutes longer. Remove and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
A small batch of English-style currant buns, written in weights and gills for a coal range. The proportions are sound; the yeast quantity and the rising time are the two things to look at before you start.
- The measuresHalf a pound of sifted flour is about 1¾ cups (225 g); two ounces of sugar is a scant ¼ cup plus a spoonful (55 g); two ounces of butter is half a stick; two ounces of currants is a generous ⅓ cup. A gill is half a cup, so each "half gill" of milk is ¼ cup — half a cup of milk in total, warm first, cold second.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So ¼ tsp salt and ¼ tsp mixed spice for the whole batch — the spicing is deliberately light.
- Compressed yeastCompressed yeast is fresh cake yeast, sold in blocks and crumbled to measure. A teaspoon of it is only a few grams, perhaps 4 to 6 g, which works out at roughly 1/2 teaspoon of instant dry yeast. Using a full teaspoon of modern dry yeast will over-ferment a dough this small.
- Mixed spicesMost likely mixed spice in the British sense: mostly cinnamon and nutmeg with allspice, coriander and clove, though period blends varied from kitchen to kitchen. Pumpkin pie spice is the nearest supermarket stand-in, or use cinnamon with a pinch of nutmeg and allspice.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Zante currants have become harder to find; dark raisins chopped once are the usual substitute, though the buns will be sweeter.
- The rise is too shortThirty minutes will barely move an enriched dough at modern room temperature, and a kitchen with a working range would have been warmer. Let the shaped buns prove until visibly puffed and slow to spring back when pressed -- often an hour or more -- and give the mixed dough a bulk rise as well if it has not doubled.
- A brisk ovenBrisk means hot: in modern terms somewhere around 400-425F, though the book gives no temperature. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits buns of this size, and the final milk wash plus two minutes back in the oven is a glaze, not further baking -- it sets to a soft shine rather than a crust.
- YieldSix buns, each about 3 oz of dough -- teacake size. They are best the day they are made.
Currant buns of this kind are the everyday English tea bun, a cousin of the hot cross bun without the cross and the heavier fruiting, and they turn up in British cookery books through the nineteenth century. The milk wash applied in the last two minutes gives a soft, glossy top on an enriched bread that has no egg glaze, and service on a folded napkin is standard presentation of the period, familiar from restaurant and hotel cookery. Filippini's book gathers dishes from across Europe and the Americas for an American readership, and a plain English bun sits here as the tea-table entry in that survey.