Monthly Archives: February 2010

It’s been said that sooner or later we’re all going to replaced by robots. Looks like for all us cooks, it’s going to be sooner.

Pagans and pagan symbolism are just the thin end of the wedge when it comes to hot cross bun buffoonery. There are all kinds of other made-up stories that have found currency over the years. Let’s see…there’s the one about the medieval monks who put crosses on their bread to ward off evil spirits. There’s the one about English housewives, so dissatisfied (i.e. “hot” and “cross”) with the output of their local bakery, they were forced to make their own rolls at home. Then there’s the one about Father Thomas Rockliffe, a medieval monk, who gave out buns that people believed had magical, curative powers. There’s the English Widow who baked a bun every day for her son who went to sea, the peasants who strung buns up on their ceilings to bring them good luck, and the priests who fashioned their buns (steady on there, gutter thinkers) after the round stone that covered Christ’s tomb.

There are a host of historical myths too. My favorite concerns Queen Elizabeth the First, who, worried about the pervasiveness of pagan breads in sixteenth-century England (wha?), tried to ban the hot cross bun. When the ban ultimately failed she decreed cross buns could only be eaten on holy days. Makes loads of sense, no? No. Again, like so much of what passes for food history, there’s not a crumb of evidence to back the story up.

All that we know for certain about hot cross buns is that they first appeared around 1700. The earliest reference to the hot cross bun appears in an obscure English publication called Poor Robin’s Almanack, dated 1733. It reads:

Good Friday comes this month, the old woman runs, with one or two a penny hot cross buns

We can fairly assume that the hot cross bun had been around for at least a decade or two before that sentence was written. But how similar was the hot cross bun that Poor Robin wrote about to the one we know today? Not terribly, since crystalline sugar was literally worth its weight in gold at the time. So, probably no icing or candied fruit. But any Georgian baker could have cut a cross in the top of a roll, so in that sense there’s probably some continuity.

All that of course begs the question as to how and why the hot cross bun first came into being. To my mind, it probably comes down to marketing. In our contemporary, Christmas-obsessed times, we tend to forget that it wasn’t so long ago (say 150 years, before Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol) that Easter was the focal point of the Christian calendar. That means there was a fair amount of hoopla, and where there’s hoopla there’s commemorative merchandise. The hot cross bun probably was to Easter what the iced cookie is to Christmas today. Or so says I.

Is pretty much what I get every year when I see mainstream food writers parroting more of the same old hot cross bun claptrap. There are probably as many erroneous, exaggerated, or just plain made-up stories about the hot cross bun as there are about the pretzel.

The most oft-cited myth goes like this: the hot cross bun is descended from pre-Christian peoples, for whom carving a cross on a round bread was a deeply mystical act connected to food and/or blood sacrifice. The symbolism, having to do with the progression of the sun, the phases of the moon, the four seasons, the four cardinal directions, and the four original members of the Banana Splits, was later co-opted by Christians as they incorporated key pagan celebrations like the spring solstice into the Christian calendar. Some trace the hot cross bun to pagan European peoples, some to the Romans, the Greeks, or the Egyptians. It all adds up to a really fun — if truly wackadoo — body of work on the subject. This crazy essay has everything but an alien landing.

The most credible writing on the origin of the hot cross bun comes from the Oxford Companion to Food, which speculates that breads marked with a cross may have been eaten by the ancient Saxons (Germanic peoples who lived around the area of modern-day Holland) in honor of their goddess of light, Eostre. What makes this idea compelling is that the spring feast of Eostre is the very celebration that evolved into our modern holiday of Easter. It is also true that the Saxons, among other tribes, invaded the English isle around the 5th century AD — and England is where the hot cross bun originated. The fly in the ointment is that there is no hard evidence that the Saxons ever ate breads marked with a cross, at the celebration of Eostre or at any other time of year.

So what we’re left with, in the end, is a lot of speculation and a lot of people straining awfully hard to try to make a pagan connection to the hot cross bun. Why, I couldn’t possibly tell you.

That message from more than a few Catholics this past week who are abstaining from chocolate as a Lenten promise. What can I say, I’m not trying to rub anything in. As I’ve mentioned on several occasions, I myself am a Catholic, so I feel your pain. (I just didn’t happen to give up chocolate this year).

Funny thing about Lent, on the one hand it means abstinence (along with prayer and giving to charity). On the other it means it’s pig-out time, at least for some of us. The way I grew up in the Chicago area, Lent was always a fairly austere period, when gratuitous eating of any kind was frowned upon. Just try telling that to the Catholics down here in Louisville, though. Lenten Fridays in this part of the South may be meatless, but they’re host to fish fries of a magnitude and exuberance that would make most northern Catholics blush. Are we really supposed to be having this much fun this time of year?

Hot cross buns were about as indulgent as the Catholics I grew up with were willing to get during Lent. Lightly glazed plain white bread was what they were, with a thin cross of white icing dripped over them. Not much to get excited about, really, save for the sweet part, which acted as a kind of portent to the sweets we were all looking forward to on Easter Sunday. My twin sister and I usually just nibbled it off and left the rest for the birds.

I did some last year, but wasn’t terribly happy with them, so I think I’ll try again. Maybe introduce a dash of that southern joie-de-vivre. You won’t tell the nuns back home now, will you?

…and you’ve got one darn delicious piece of double-chocolate cake, my friends. And while I don’t mean to brag about this, it went over huge with the little one for her birthday. This despite the fact that on the afternoon of her party she asked to change her cake order to something pink with an icing illustration of Tinkerbell riding on a horse with wings (over a rainbow, obviously). Happily, the disappointment that I wasn’t able to deliver on her new fantasy melted away with the first chocolaty bite. Whew! Let’s hope she doesn’t try to put my awful piping skills to that sort of test next year, or my daughters’ image of me as SuperDad will be blown forever.