Powerful Aroma of Home and History In Hot Cross Buns
22 03 2008Young Son is learning to play the bagpipes, with a Scottish family of professional performers. So I chat with the mom and drink tea twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, as the dad and Young Son play their pipes.
This week she mentioned her plan to search local bakeries for traditional hot cross buns, for Good Friday.
I only remember hot cross buns from the nursery rhyme we girls jumped rope to, once upon a time. And I never thought they were any more “real” than four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie . . .
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
This power of story in this bakery specialty remains hugely popular in the UK (actual Christian devotion, not so much? ) And taking the hot cross bun historical perspective in a whole different direction, one of the links warns families that these days, “finding hot cross buns made to ‘Slow Food’ principles can be quite difficult. . .”
Has anybody got a hot cross buns story to play here for our entertainment?
Also see“Enlightenment Among the Hot Cross Buns” - a UK Telegraph column praising Easter-story art and music.
The comments (pro and con) interest us too, because we’re just starting to read “God’s Crucible” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, the documented history of the clash between Islam and Christianity as “mission” religions, and how it has shaped culture across the continents and millennia:
Speaking of symbolism and the Easter holidays,you might enjoy this food-stuffed essay about everything from candy peeps to pasta and fruit:
and mixed commercial messages using the cross as a symbol, make a graphic appearance here.
Perhaps hot cross buns are a mainly Catholic & Episcopalian tradition? Both my grandmas used to bake them on Good Friday growing up…
Hi CW - the Scot family we know is of course Presbyterian, thoroughly Scottish.
And I guess England is a land of Anglicans?
So maybe hot cross buns are an “ecumenical” treat.
I’ve seen recipes for “resurrection cookies” but they don’t sound toothsome to me, more like a lesson diorama not meant for actual enjoyment. But hot cross buns make my mouth water just looking at the picture . . .
It seems cool you’d have real memories of these on BOTH sides of the family!