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Dessert

Funeral Buns

A sweet yeast bun with currants, ginger, caraway, cinnamon, and rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Funeral Buns

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, rub together the flour, butter, and sugar until well combined.

  3. Add the currants, ginger, caraway seeds, cinnamon, and rose water to the mixture.

  4. Gradually mix in enough milk to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into 48 round cakes, each weighing about 1 pound.

  2. Place the cakes on a baking sheet and bake until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Caraway + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Ginger + carawaytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and cakes together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, tenderising the crumb and helping browning.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning in the oven.
Currants
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy fruit throughout the cakes.
Barm
Acts as the leavening agent, producing gas that lifts the dough.

The step that matters

Baking until golden brown. Browning comes from sugars and proteins reacting in the oven's heat. Pulling the cakes too early leaves them pale and doughy inside, while leaving them too long dries them out.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, ginger, caraway, cinnamon, rose):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, ginger, caraway, cinnamon, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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