Recipes

This brioche needs a cake of factory yeast, a block of ice and a cook willing to beat dough by hand for a very long time. It comes from an American cookbook written under a borrowed name, and it has to be started the day before. At the end of all that, it comes out of the oven as a twisted crown of rich French bread, and we think it’s worth getting to know why.

Eliza Leslie’s Bath buns turn gold before they ever reach the oven, tinted with a saffron tea and finished with a scatter of sugared caraway. She printed them in Philadelphia in 1840. They are an English bun worked out in an American kitchen, with the dough set to rise by the fire. She also had one firm rule: eat them the day they’re baked.

Marion Harland’s raisin bread fits in a single paragraph and asks for eight hours of patience. It comes from a writer whose first household book sold more than a million copies, and it trusts the reader to recognize a ‘good batter’ on sight.

Most family recipes reach the kitchen through a grandmother. This one came from a Boston hotel that kept its own version secret for decades. Fannie Farmer printed one anyway, with level measurements, a floured knife handle and a buttered fold that lets each roll open slightly as it rises.

Eliza Acton’s Geneva rolls start out as a modest bread: flour, a little butter, milk, eggs, and a splash of saffron water for a golden color. Then, in a single sentence near the end, she turns them into something richer. Sugar, currants, lemon, and candied peel make ‘excellent buns’ from the same dough.

In 1919 a kosher cookbook printed in New York handed its readers a Saxon Christmas bread and trusted them to know what to do with it. There is no oven temperature and no yeast weight, just a cake of yeast, a moderate oven and a fold down the middle. What comes out is stollen with the candied peel, the spice and the sugar coat left behind.

Somewhere between a Czech holiday pastry and a quick drop bun sits this little cake from a 1919 New York cookbook. It asks for yeast by the cake, an oven that is simply “hot,” and a cook who knows “light” dough when she sees it. Then it crowns each one with a single raisin or cherry.

In 1919 a New York cook could open Florence Kreisler Greenbaum’s cookbook, find a cake with a German name, and start it the old way, with a little yeast and milk set ‘back of the stove’ to rise. The cake was a kugelhopf: tall, ring-shaped, dotted with raisins and citron. It reached that page by way of Viennese breakfast tables, and its shape is old enough that Romans camped near Vienna knew it.