One a penny

Nothing is as delicious as a fluffy, spicy, fruity hot cross bun at Easter, but its miraculous properties and ancient origins may be a little exaggerated, as Carla Passino discovers

- Carla Passino

ROCK hard, riddled with woodworm and munched by mice, it can’t have looked like the most appetising of hot cross buns. Yet, 23 years ago, Bill Foster—a baker from Tavistock, Devon—bought the stale pastry for a Guinness World Record-setting £155. It might sound rather barmy, except that the bun was an antique. It had been baked in Stepney, London, in 1829 and superstition had ensured it would survive to go under the hammer at Birmingham’s NEC nearly two centuries later: it was found tucked under a house’s rafters, where it had been stashed to bring good luck.

Perhaps it’s because of their association with Easter or because they don’t go mouldy as quickly as bread does, but hot cross buns have long been seen as miraculous. Their very origin is steeped in myth. ‘Institutions have decayed, empires have crumbled away, monuments have disappeared like scenes in a pantomime, and this hot cross bun is apparently the only thing that has survived them all,’ wrote The Illustrated London News in April 1855. Many Victorians, such as author Charles Hindley, drew a parallel between the buns and the ‘sweet cakes of flour and honey’ offered to the goddess Astarte of the ancient Levant and the bull-stamped rolls of the Classical world—he even launched into an audacious explanation linking the word bun to the Greek boûs, for bull (today’s etymology favours a proto-Germanic origin).