Buns

Buns were a Victorian favourite but they still form an important part of the British baking repertoire today. Sugar became very cheap in the 19th century and therefore found its way into the ‘fancy goods’ and buns that were demanded by the emerging middle class. These small buns were made from yeast dough enriched with either butter, eggs or cream, with or without a topping or filling, and, most importantly, they were sweetened. Buns are usually eaten as they are, but some are also spread with butter and served with something extra like jam and cream or even treacle. The Yorkshire tea cake is generally only eaten toasted.

The most common buns in British cuisine are the Chelsea bun, Hot cross bun, Belgian bun, Yorkshire tea cake and the Iced finger. There are, however, many regional buns that often don’t travel beyond the county borders. In Cornwall you will find Saffron buns, in Northern Ireland and on the west coast of Scotland there are Paris buns, and in Bath you will find not only the Bath bun but also the Sally Lunn. There are ‘dough nuts’ from the Isle of Wight and rock cakes from Brighton. Some buns are called cakes, while some cakes are called buns – the English language keeps us on our toes!

Chelsea bun, the 18th-century ‘it’ bun

In the early 18th century, there was a bakery in London’s borough of Chelsea called The Chelsea Bun House. One of the owners was known as ‘Captain Bun’, and King George II, Queen Caroline, King George III and Queen Charlotte and their children were among their custom. The newspapers reported that the shop looked more like a ballroom than a bakery, with its luxury furniture, statues, curiosities and large paintings on the walls. The long shopfront was decorated with a colonnade that stood out on the sidewalk. The interior and exterior were captured by artists, just as we would take a photo for Instagram today. People reportedly walked great distances to buy their buns at the bun house. It was even claimed in a local newspaper that 50,000 people went to The Chelsea Bun House one Good Friday to get hold of a Hot cross bun that the bakery exclusively baked on that day. The then owner noted that from then on there would be only Chelsea buns at the shop because the whole neighbourhood had complained about ‘the immense unruly and riotous London mob’ that had gathered there to buy a Hot cross bun.

Although the store had been a thriving business since at least 1711, the closure in 1804 of the nearby Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, where the gentry would hang out, impacted the business and it was demolished in 1839 when the last heir of the family died without succession and ownership went to the Crown. It was a pity, because The Mirror of 4 May 1839 reported that The Chelsea Bun House still sold more than 24,000 buns on Good Friday of that year. The same newspaper also wrote that the shop would be rebuilt after the regeneration of the street, but unfortunately The Chelsea ‘New’ Bun House was never erected.

According to Elizabeth David, The Chelsea Bun House was indeed resurrected in 1951, albeit briefly, as part of the celebration of the Festival of Britain. She describes the Chelsea bun as an English institution. Today, Chelsea buns no longer have a store dedicated to them, but they are still sold everywhere. One particular bakery that is especially noted for its Chelsea buns is Fitzbillies in Cambridge, which has been baking its celebrated Chelsea buns since 1920.

The buns of Bath

In the majestic city of Bath, nestled in a green valley with its Roman baths and elegant wide Georgian streets and circuses, you will find two famous buns: the Sally Lunn and the Bath bun. Both buns even have their own tearoom dedicated to them.

The Sally Lunn is a soft, white brioche-like bun with a shiny golden-brown head and has been known in cookbooks since 1776. In these cookbooks it is usually stated that a tea cake without currants is a Sally Lunn bun. But there is also a difference in baking, as the tea cake is baked freely, while in The Cook’s Oracle from William Kitchiner in 1830, the Sally Lunn is baked in a shallow tin or ring so that the bun has a pale band at the bottom.

The Bath bun was usually called a Bath cake in the 18th century. Bath resident and cookbook author Martha Bradley gave a recipe for Bath seed cake in her 1756 book, The British Housewife. According to Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 book, The Experienced English Housekeeper, the Bath cake is the size of a French roll and had to be served hot for breakfast. Jane Austen, who lived in Bath for a while, was a fan of Bath buns and wrote in 1801 that she would eat herself sick if her sister, Cassandra, would not accompany her during a visit. This shows that in Austen’s time, the Bath cakes were already known as Bath buns.

Both buns were exclusively a treat for the rich. In the 18th century, ordinary people did not eat sweet pastries for breakfast. Sweet yeasted breads and buns were only slightly more widely distributed among the various classes in Victorian times, when bakeries became more industrialised and the price of sugar decreased.

The Bath buns from Martha Bradley’s and Elizabeth Raffald’s books and those known to Jane Austen would have been very similar. They were flavoured and decorated with caraway seeds or caraway comfits, made by covering the seeds with layers of sugar. Making caraway comfits was, and still is, a time-consuming task, with the seeds being dried between each layer, resulting in something that looks like ‘hundreds and thousands’ sprinkles, but is more similar to Indian mukhwas, which still contain the seeds. Caraway comfits were, along with other comfits, often served at the end of a meal to aid digestion, just as they still do in India with mukhwas.

Towards the end of the 19th century, candied peel, lemon peel and/or dried fruit and mixed spices became popular additions. The Bath buns of today are no longer made or decorated with caraway seeds or comfits. They are now baked with a lump of sugar in them and decorated with a few sugar nibs and currants. I’ve given the recipe for the pre-19th century and the modern version, so you can decide for yourself which version you like best.

During the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, organised by Prince Albert, 934,691 Bath buns were sold to visitors. According to the stories, people noticed that the Bath bun sold in London was much less lavish, hence it was renamed the ‘London bun’. In John Kirkland’s book, The Modern Baker, Confectioner and Caterer, you will find a recipe for cheap Bath buns or London buns, which confirms this story.