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Suffolk Buns
(England.) Rub 4 ounces butter with 1 pound flour, 1 spoonful of salt, 2 spoonfuls of baking powder, 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar, and 3 tablespoonfuls of currants. Mix well, add 2 eggs well beaten, whites and yolks separately, and a little milk to make a stiff paste. Roll out, cut in rounds 1 inch thick. Bake in a slow oven.
A plain English currant bun, closer to a scone than to anything yeast-raised. The recipe is written in the shorthand of its day, and two of its instructions — the spoon measures and the oven — need translating before it will work.
- The hinge: don't take "slow oven" literallyThe hinge: don't take "slow oven" too literally -- a slow oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 275-325F, and at that heat a chemically raised bun can set before it lifts. Buns of this type are usually baked hot, 400-425F for 12-15 minutes.
- Spoon measures are unstandardisedAn unqualified "spoonful" may mean either a teaspoon or a tablespoon, and this recipe specifies "tablespoonfuls" where it wants them. Reading the salt as 1 teaspoon and the baking powder as 2 teaspoons is the safer interpretation; a tablespoon of salt in a pound of flour would be inedible.
- WeightsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; 4 ounces of butter is one stick. The dough is deliberately lean — half the butter you would put in a modern scone — which is why the eggs and milk carry it.
- Beating the whites separatelySeparately beaten whites add lift. Fold the whipped whites in last, after the milk, and stop as soon as the dough comes together; with modern baking powder you can simply beat the eggs whole without much loss.
- "A stiff paste"Add the milk a spoonful at a time. The dough should be firm enough to roll and hold a cut edge, not sticky — closer to shortcrust in handling than to a drop batter.
- Cutting themRoll to a full inch thick and cut with a 2-inch round cutter, pressing straight down without twisting so the sides rise evenly. Gather and re-roll scraps once only.
- CurrantsThree tablespoons is a modest scatter by modern taste. Dried currants are the small black Zante kind, not fresh red or black currants; plump them in warm water for ten minutes and pat dry if they are hard.
- YieldAbout 14 to 16 buns from a pound of flour. They are best the day they are made, split and buttered while still warm.
Suffolk and its neighbouring East Anglian counties gave their names to a whole family of small plain tea cakes — Suffolk rusks, Suffolk buns — that share the same logic: a stiff, lightly enriched dough, a handful of currants, and a quick bake, all of it achievable in a farmhouse kitchen without waiting on yeast. Recipes of this shape spread after commercial baking powder became available in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century, which turned what had been a slow morning's work into something a cook could manage far more quickly. The heading "(England.)" suggests something of this book's purpose: recipes appear labelled with their country, so a bun of this kind seems to stand in as the English contribution to the tea table rather than as anything specifically famous.