Skip to main content
Dessert

Bath Buns

Bath buns are sweet baked buns with caraway seeds, topped with sugar and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turmeric and caraway share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Bath Buns

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the egg yolks and beat until foamy.

  3. Sift the turmeric, salt, and flour together.

  4. Stir in the caraway seeds, then quickly mix in the flour.

Shape and bake

  1. Place the batter on buttered baking pans in pieces the size of a lemon.

  2. Top each piece with a teaspoon of granulated sugar or press in a lump of loaf sugar and a cube of citron.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until a straw can be inserted without sticking.

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. Turmeric + carawaytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Turmeric + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the buns a tender, rich crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness, colour and structure that help the batter bind and set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter as it bakes.
Sugar
Creamed with butter for aeration and adds sweetness and surface browning.

The step that matters

Mixing in the flour. Once flour is added, overmixing develops gluten and can make the buns tough and dense. Stir in the flour quickly and only until just combined.

Swap the turmeric

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Turmericthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, caraway. 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes