Citron Buns
1 yeast cake 6 tablespoonfuls sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco ½ cupful raisins 1/4 cupful chopped citron peel 1 cupful scalded milk 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 5½ cupfuls flour 1 egg 1/4 cupful lukewarm water 1 teaspoonful salt Scald milk, add half of sugar and salt; when lukewarm add yeast dissolved in water and 1½ cupfuls flour. Mix, cover, and let rise till light; then add Crisco, remainder of sugar and flour, raisins, peel, and extract. Knead lightly, cover, and let rise. Divide into small pieces, let rise on greased tins, brush over with beaten egg and bake in hot oven twenty minutes.
Sufficient for twenty-two buns.
A sweet enriched yeast dough in the pre-war American style, leavened in two stages. The ingredient list as printed is scrambled, so read the method first and treat the list as a rough shopping guide.
- The missing yeastYeast appears in the method but not in the ingredient list. Use one packet of active dry yeast (2¼ teaspoons) dissolved in the ¼ cup of lukewarm water; the original would have called for one cake of compressed yeast.
- Flour quantityThe flour figures were checked against the printed page: 5½ cupfuls in all, with 1½ cupfuls going into the sponge and the rest worked in at the second stage. Hold back the last half cupful and add it only if the dough is slack.
- Two milk quantitiesThe list gives both 1 cup scalded milk and, trailing at the end, ¾ cup milk. Scald and use 1 cup; the ¾ cup is a stray line from another recipe or an alternate scaling, and adding both will give you batter.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in this period is 400–425F. Twenty minutes at 400F suits buns of this size; the egg wash browns fast, so check at fifteen.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and was probably firmer and waxier than today's reformulated product. Modern shortening works directly; butter also works and tastes better, though the crumb may be slightly less tender.
- Citron peelCandied citron — the thick white peel of Citrus medica — is now a specialty item, mostly seen at Christmas. Candied orange or mixed peel is the usual substitute; chop it fine, as citron was sold in hard slabs and cut small.
- Working in the fruitThe recipe adds the raisins and peel along with the fat, sugar and remaining flour; if you prefer, work them in at the end of kneading, since fruit added early can tear the developing gluten.
- Rising timesThe recipe gives none. Expect about an hour for the sponge, an hour to ninety minutes for the second rise, and thirty to forty-five minutes for the shaped buns on the tins.
- YieldTwenty-two buns, which is generous — divide the dough into pieces of roughly 60 g each and set them well apart so they can spread as they proof.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the product was introduced in 1911, and it belongs to a genre of cookbook that exists to teach cooks what to do with an unfamiliar ingredient. Crisco was the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, and the book's argument throughout is that it can stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen — hence recipes like this one, an ordinary sweet yeast bun rewritten with the new fat in place of the butter a cook would otherwise have reached for. The buns themselves are much older than the shortening: raisin-and-peel yeast buns run back through English baking to the Good Friday and festival breads, and candied citron was a familiar luxury store-cupboard item in American households of the period.