Hot cross buns are soft, sweet, spiced buns studded with dried fruit and marked on top with a cross. They are eaten around Easter, and the correct method is to split them, toast them, and put considerably more butter on than seems reasonable.
The cross
The cross represents the Crucifixion, and the spices are sometimes said to represent those used to embalm Christ. It is piped on before baking as a paste of flour and water, which is why it is pale and slightly chalky rather than incised into the dough.
Traditionally they were eaten on Good Friday and only on Good Friday. That restriction has collapsed entirely.
The creeping season
The annual British complaint. Hot cross buns now appear in supermarkets in early January, sometimes within days of the Christmas decorations coming down, and every year there is a small national grumble about it in the papers and on social media.
The complaint has never made the slightest difference. Sales in January are strong, which is precisely why the shops do it, and the same people who complain buy them.
The variations
The traditional bun is currants or sultanas with mixed peel. Supermarkets now produce a great many others, and the arrival of each new flavour is treated as a minor event:
- Chocolate chip, and salted caramel
- Apple and cinnamon
- Toffee, orange, cherry and almond
- Extra-fruited, and luxury versions with brandy-soaked fruit
Purists object to all of them, particularly the chocolate ones, on the grounds that a hot cross bun without peel is simply a bun with a cross drawn on it.
The old rules and superstitions
An Elizabethan decree restricted the sale of spiced buns to burials, Good Friday and Christmas — a genuine piece of Tudor bread regulation, though its exact motive is debated.
Several superstitions attached to buns baked on Good Friday itself, all of which held that they would never go mouldy. Consequently they were hung from kitchen ceilings for the year to protect the house from fire, taken to sea to prevent shipwreck, and grated into water as a medicine. A few pubs still keep a collection of them, most famously the Widow’s Son in Bromley-by-Bow, where a bun is added every Good Friday.
Another tradition says that sharing a hot cross bun with someone will secure your friendship for the coming year, accompanied by the rhyme: Half for you and half for me, between us two shall goodwill be.
The rhyme
The street cry of the London bun sellers survives as a nursery rhyme every British child learns:
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,
One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns.