The Authorized Version

It seems that Australian bakers created something of a storm of culinary controversy this Easter season by going wild with flavoring their Hot Cross offerings: Pizza, raspberry fudge and white chocolate, cheese and vegemite, Biscoff biscuit bits, sticky date and caramel, and Japanese yuzu The Wall Street Journal reported as being on offer to our friends Down Under. This last, an Asian citrus which the baker used to infuse raisins, seems the most in keeping with tradition as bitter orange has often been used in Hot Cross Buns to symbolize the bitterness of Christ's suffering.

Hot Cross buns have been a traditional Good Friday and Easter treat in England since the 12th century. Bakers generally, from the Middle Ages to today, have cut a cross in the top of a loaf before baking to encourage better rising.For Hot Cross Buns, the indentation was filled with a white flour and water paste to emphasize the cross. Today many bakeries like to make the cross with white icing, but I prefer to do the traditional white paste.

I love the slightly sweet, spicy buns filled with dried fruits. They are a perfect food to mark the end of Lent and to break one’s fast on Good Friday. Of course, the cross on top represents the cross of Christ, and it is said that the spices symbolize the spices used to embalm His body.

It is thought that the contemporary hot cross bun of Christianity originated in 1316  when Father Thomas Rocliff, the cook at St. Alban’s Abbey, developed a recipe called an "Alban Bun" and distributed the bun to the poor on Good Friday.

A common Medieval belief was that the buns had holy powers. A bun would be hung from the ceiling of the home to protect all within from harm. The Widow's Son, a pub in east London which dates from the early 19th century, hosts the tradition of storing hot cross buns in a net hanging over the bar. Known locally as The Bun House, it is said the widow’s son hung a fresh Hot Cross Bun there before going off to sea so it would be there for him when he returned. The tradition has continued ever since, with a sailor from the Royal Navy placing a new bun in the net every year.

In an effort to curtail “popish” activities, both Elizabeth I and James I limited the sale of Hot Cross Buns to Good Friday, Christmas, and for funerals. As a result, hot cross buns at the time were primarily made at home.

They were available again for public purchase at least by the mid-18th century when Poor Robin’s Almanac recorded the London street cry:

            Good Friday comes this month, the old woman runs

            With one or two a penny hot cross buns,

            Whose virtue is, if you believe what’s said,

           They’ll not grow mouldy like the common bread. 

The familiar line “One a penny, two a penny, hot cross-buns” is from the English nursery rhyme “Hot Cross Buns” published in the London Chronicle in June 1767. In those days the streets of Georgian London would be alive at dawn with street venders carrying wicker baskets filled with the spicy, sweet-smelling buns. The criers would compete for customers with the rhyme,

            Hot-cross buns! Hot-cross buns!

            One a penny, two a penny, Hot-cross buns!

            If you have no daughters, Give them to your sons;

            But if you have none of those little elves, Then you must eat them all yourselves! 

When working with traditional English recipes a question always in my mind is whether or not this is a food Jane Austen would have known. Hot Cross Buns seem to have been ubiquitous across England in Georgian and Regency times. The blog of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath gives an 1825 recipe for Hot Cross Buns. As for buns Jane Austen is sure to have eaten, Martha Loyd’s Household Book, The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen’s Kitchen, edited by Julienne Gehrer, gives the recipe preserved by Martha Lloyd, who oversaw the Austen kitchen at Chawton cottage. Martha’s “Bolton Buns” contain butter, sugar, flour, currants, yeast, eggs, and milk, but not the spices so essential to Hot Cross Buns. 

It is possible the Austen household bought their Hot Cross buns. Since Alton and Basingstoke were both market towns, it is likely they would have had bakeries selling such delicacies. As to hearing the street criers, I found it impossible to pinpoint Jane Austen’s whereabouts on any Good Friday. We do know she spent much of April 1811, with her brother Henry and his wife Eliza in their upscale Sloane Street home in London. If she was with them on Good Friday, 12 April that year, she would likely have heard the ubiquitous street sellers. 

Jane was certainly no stranger to purchasing treats from the bakery because in Mansfield Park she has her heroine Fanny Price, visiting her family in Portsmouth, send her little brothers out for biscuits and buns to make up for the poor provisions provided at the Price table. 

I often take the easy route of ordering my Hot Cross Buns from a local bakery but this year, in a burst of enthusiastic energy, chose to bake my own. Nigella Lawson’s recipe (use toggle for US measurements) might not be as traditional as the Martha Lloyd recipe Jane Austen would have known, but I found it an easy and delicious way to treat my family and friends. 

Whether you choose to purchase from a street seller, a bakery, or make your own, I wish you a blessed Holy Week and Easter. And if you haven't had your Hot Cross Bun yet, remember--Easter is a whole season. You have a full seven weeks until Pentecost to indulge.