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Cross Buns

Cross Buns are sweet yeast buns flavored with coriander, cinnamon, and mace, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Coriander and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,635 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cross 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.

Prepare the dough

  1. Warm the flour in a wooden bowl.

  2. Melt the butter in the milk until warm.

  3. Mix the warm milk and butter with the yeast and salt. Combine the mixture with the flour to form a paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into buns and place them on a tin. Cover the buns with flannel and let them rise for 15 minutes.

  2. Brush the buns with warm milk and bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) 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. Coriander + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 main structure that holds the dough together and sets when baked.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives the buns a tender texture.
Milk
Supplies moisture to form the dough and helps the crust brown as it bakes.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Letting the buns rise. Yeast needs warmth and time to produce gas; if the buns rise too little they stay dense, and rising too long can cause them to collapse or taste sour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, milk, coriander, cinnamon):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, milk, coriander, cinnamon. 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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