Home › Pastries › Hot Cross Buns
Hot Cross Buns
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 3/4 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 egg 1½ yeast cake Flour 1/4 cupful chopped candied citron ½ cupful seeded raisins peel 1 cupful scalded milk 1/4 cupful lukewarm water Add Crisco, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add yeast cake dissolved in water, spices, egg well beaten, and sufficient flour to make a stiff dough. Mix well, add raisins and peel, cover, and let rise over night. In morning divide into pieces and form into neat buns; place in Criscoed pan one inch apart, let rise, brush over with milk or beaten egg, and bake in moderately hot oven twenty-five minutes. Cool, and with ornamental frosting make a cross on each bun. The cross may be made by placing strips of paste on buns before they are baked.
Sufficient for twenty buns.
The ingredient list has been mangled in printing — it appears twice, partly out of order, and the flour is given no quantity at all. Read the method first and treat the list as a checklist rather than a recipe.
- The reconstructed ingredientsScalded milk (the two lists give 1 cupful in one place and 1½ cupful in the other), ¼ cup sugar, Crisco (given as 3 tablespoonfuls in one list and ¼ cupful in the other), 1 teaspoon salt, 1½ yeast cakes dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water, 1 beaten egg, ¾ teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ginger, 1½ cups seeded raisins, ¼ cup chopped candied citron, and peel (listed with no quantity). Flour to make a stiff dough — perhaps 4 to 4½ cups, depending on which milk quantity you follow.
- Yeast cakesOne compressed cake of the period was about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to one modern packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast. So 1½ cakes is about 1 tablespoon of active dry.
- Overnight riseA tablespoon of yeast in a sweet dough left out all night at modern room temperature will over-ferment and go sour and slack. Either cut the yeast to about 1 teaspoon for a room-temperature overnight rise, or use the full amount and refrigerate the covered bowl.
- Moderately hot ovenRoughly 375–400°F. Twenty-five minutes is about right for buns this size; they should read around 190°F inside.
- Scalding the milkWith unpasteurized milk, scalding was done to kill bacteria and to denature whey proteins thought to weaken the dough. With pasteurized milk it serves mainly to melt the shortening and dissolve the sugar, so heating it warm is enough — but let it come down to lukewarm before the yeast goes in, or the heat will kill the yeast.
- Crisco and "Criscoed"Any vegetable shortening works; butter gives more flavour and a slightly softer crumb. "Criscoed pan" simply means greased.
- Citron peelCandied citron is still sold at Christmas but is scarce the rest of the year. Mixed candied peel or candied orange peel substitutes directly.
- The crossesThe frosting cross is applied after cooling. The alternative "strips of paste" means thin ribbons of plain flour-and-water or short pastry laid on before baking — commercial buns today are commonly crossed with a piped stiff flour-and-water batter.
- YieldTwenty buns, placed an inch apart; at that spacing they will probably spread and touch as they rise.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to demonstrate that Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed oil could stand in for butter and lard across an entire cookbook, and a page of Good Friday buns is exactly the sort of familiar, sentimental baking chosen to make that argument. Hot cross buns themselves are much older: spiced, fruited breads marked with a cross are recorded in English baking well before the nineteenth century, and are traditionally tied to Good Friday, with the cross generally understood as a Christian mark though it is often said to descend from earlier quartered ritual loaves. The London street cry "one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns" was in print by the late 1700s. What dates this version is the ginger — a heavier hand with warm spice than most modern recipes use — and the overnight rise of the dough.