M
y next-door neighbour Al – a peerless amateur baker- was vexed when I told him I was researching the
history of hot cross buns. Flicking through the
photos on his phone he showed me a close-up of a
12-pack of chocolate-chip buns with icing crosses. “Oh, I know,”
I nodded. “I’m not a fan of the sugary ‘not cross bun’ either.”
“A travesty!” he replied. “But look closer – it gets worse.”
I squinted into his phone and the cause of his outrage
appeared in tiny typed print: “Expiry date: 3 January 2018”.
What is it that sparks our moral indignation each year when
supermarkets dare to play with the recipes of our beloved Easter
treats and deliver them to us in untimely fashion? Many of
us are happy to eat berries in winter or root vegetables in
summer. But a hot cross bun studded with chocolate and
Belgian toffee, or infused with orange peel or mocha, then
served out of season has us photographing the evidence like
investigators at a crime scene.
The sanctity of hot cross buns,
it seems, is bound up in our
childhood memories: the innocent
scent of yeasty, raisin-studded buns
warming in the oven, redolent of
butter, allspice and the languor of
Easter holidays. Hot cross buns would
arrive in our kitchen a week or two
before Easter and vanish immediately
after. They appeared like mysterious
relics of a sepia-tinted past when
profits would cede to ritual; when
the market would give way to magic.
Even as a child I appreciated their
significance – the capacity for bread to
connect palates across centuries. And
they came with a rhyme that sounded
positively Dickensian: “Hot cross buns.
Hot cross buns. One a penny, two a
penny. Hot cross buns.” You could
almost see the stout women perched
on the sides of rickety wagons hollering
down rain-licked, cobblestoned streets.
It came as some surprise, then, to
discover that this staple of any six-year-
old’s song book went back further than
the 19th century. Like Molly
Malone’s cry of “Cockles
and mussels, alive, alive-oh”
in the Irish song, the piece
can be dated to the rhyming
cries of 18th-century street
vendors who could be
credited with the first form
of advertising jingle. But the
origins of hot cross buns go
back even further.
In fact, it would not be
grandiose to say the vast history of
Western civilisation, the rise and fall
of deities and dynasties, could be told
within the honey-hued glaze of this
small, spiced bread.
The Saxons, we are told, ate buns
marked with crosses in honour of Eostre,
goddess of spring or light, who gave her
name to Easter. Antiquarians cite similar
practices among the Druids, Phoenicians,
Greeks and Romans in honour of Diana,goddess of the hunt and the moon.
Some of the sacred “cakes” were
marked with the image of deer or ox
horns, and others a cross, signifying
the four quarters of the moon. Indeed,
if you were to go to Pompeii today you
could see the remains of such buns in
an ancient bakehouse. Herodotus tells
us that at the time they were left in
sanctuaries built at crossroads for
fugitives and hunters.
The Bible records that in 587BC
Jeremiah denounced Hebrew women
for neglecting their Christian
father and continuing to
worship Diana, offering up
“cakes to the moon, the
queen of the shining sky”.
Of course, the early
Christian church didn’t
have time for such pagan
idolatry and marshalled the
buns into the service of
God. Hot cross buns became
commemorations of Good
Friday, and across Christendom the
cross came to represent the crucifixion
and the spices symbolised those used
to embalm Jesus at his burial.
The bun had been blessed.
In the late 16th century Queen
Elizabeth forbade the sale of hot cross
buns at any time other than burials,
Good Friday and Christmas, perhaps
because they were considered to be so
holy. If you were caught baking them➤“The buns
were now
made in the
secrecy of the
home and the
mythology
again grew.”GOURMET TRAVELLER 41