Hot Cross Bun Day

What the day is

Hot Cross Bun Day marks the spiced, fruited bun marked with a cross that is traditionally eaten on Good Friday. This record stores it on September 11, which does not correspond to the traditional day.

Origin and background

The bun is an enriched dough, meaning one carrying fat, sugar, egg and milk. Those additions make it tender and keep it soft for longer, and they also slow the yeast down, which is why enriched doughs take longer to rise than plain bread. The spicing is usually cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice, with dried fruit and sometimes candied peel.

The cross is not cut into the dough. On a commercial bun it is a paste of flour and water piped over the top before baking, which sets pale and matte because it has no fat or sugar to brown, so it stays visible against the glazed crust around it. Some traditional recipes used a strip of pastry instead.

The origin stories deserve skepticism. It is widely repeated that the buns descend from cakes marked for a pre-Christian goddess, or from Saxon offerings, and there is no good evidence for any of it. These accounts appear in the nineteenth century and later, long after the buns are first recorded, and they follow a familiar pattern in which an old custom acquires a satisfyingly ancient pagan ancestry after the fact. The honest position is that the bun is a Christian Good Friday food whose earlier history is undocumented.

What is recorded is regulation. In Elizabethan England sale of these spiced buns was restricted to particular occasions, burials and Good Friday and Christmas among them, apparently to stop bakers making them the rest of the year.

That restriction has decisively failed, and they are now sold from January onward.

How to take part

• Allow an enriched dough longer to rise than you would plain bread.
• Pipe the cross from flour and water, which is all it ever was.
• Toast a day-old one, which is better than a fresh one.
• Be suspicious of the ancient pagan origin, which is a later invention.