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Sponge Buns
Sift quarter pound flour on a corner of table, make a fountain in the centre, place in the fountain one teaspoon baking powder, one ounce butter, one beaten-up egg, two gills fresh milk, one ounce powdered sugar, one saltspoon salt and two ounces raisins. Knead the whole well together briskly for ten minutes. Divide the paste into six equal parts and round each piece in cake form. Arrange on a lightly buttered pastry pan and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A small English-style currant bun written in French kitchen shorthand. The proportions as printed are internally inconsistent, so read the liquid note before you start.
- The liquid is the problemA quarter pound of flour is about 1 cup (115 g); two gills is a full cup of milk. That ratio gives a loose batter, not the stiff "paste" the recipe asks you to knead and round by hand. Either the flour or the milk figure is off — add the milk a spoonful at a time and stop when you have a soft, shaggy dough.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Do not knead ten minutesThis is a baking-powder dough, not bread. Ten minutes of brisk kneading develops gluten and turns the buns tough and dense. Bring it together with the hands in under a minute and stop.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means finely ground granulated sugar — modern caster sugar — not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Small rich buns of this type are usually baked at around 400°F, and twenty minutes at that heat should suit six pieces; they are done when the bottoms are golden and firm.
- Rub in the butterOne ounce of butter (2 tablespoons) worked into the flour before the wet ingredients go in gives a better crumb than the fountain method as written, which simply drops everything into the well at once.
- RaisinsTwo ounces is about a third of a cup for six small buns. Currants or sultanas suit the style better and distribute more evenly than large raisins.
- YieldSix buns, best eaten the day they are baked; they stale quickly.
The "fountain" — a mound of flour with a well pressed into the centre — is standard French pastry instruction, and its appearance here signals a professional kitchen writer rather than a domestic one; Alexander Filippini, whose International Cook Book collected short entries of this kind, spent his career in restaurant kitchens and wrote in that clipped, quantity-first idiom throughout. The bun itself is plainly British: flour, butter, a little sugar, dried fruit and a chemical raising agent, baked as small rounds and eaten fresh, is the same family as the rock cake and the plain tea bun that filled English bakery windows through the nineteenth century. Calling it a "sponge" bun is loose usage — there is no whisked sponge here, just one beaten egg — and may reflect a period when "sponge" was perhaps applied to anything light and quickly raised rather than to the specific foam-based method it means now, though that is speculation.