By Jean Fitzpatrick
It was an impulse buy. Spotting a tray of hot cross buns in the window of Junior’s, the New York bakery famous for cheesecake, I popped inside and picked up two, one each for myself and my husband. Definitely not as divine as Junior’s Brownie Marble Swirl, but to be fair, Junior’s buns — with a velvety yeast dough and not too sweet — were better than many I remember. Wikipedia says hot cross buns are believed to predate Christianity, and most of the leaden ones I’ve eaten tasted at least that old.
So why did I buy these buns, you ask? I guess they remind me of my childhood. I don’t mean they inspire an extended reverie, like the famous madeleine did for Proust. Instead, they bring me back to some of my earliest, somewhat perplexed theologizing. When I was growing up, back in the days of black and white television, we usually had Rice Krispies for breakfast. During Lent, which was — as I understood it — all about giving up things, the sweet, iced buns would inexplicably appear on our Formica kitchen table instead. A treat — and yet, not entirely. No matter how recently they had arrived from the bakery, they always tasted stale. They were called “hot cross buns” but they were never (in those pre-microwave days) remotely warm. That, I reasoned, was why they were okay to eat during a season of gloom. And then there were all those raisins and candied fruit. Yuck. For years I figured hot cross buns were a Lenten cousin to the dreaded Christmas fruitcake. Like many aspects of religion, hot cross buns were full of paradoxes and were not as good as other people seemed to think they were but, by virtue of their annual reappearance, they managed to be somehow comforting.
I didn’t know then that the buns have a long and complex history. Turns out buns marked with a cross were eaten by Saxons in honour of the goddess Eostre. The cross is thought to have symbolized the four quarters of the moon. (“Eostre,” of course, is probably the origin of the name Easter.) According to the food writer Elizabeth David, Protestant English monarchs saw the buns as a dangerous hold-over of Catholic belief in England, since they were baked from the same dough used to make communion wafers. The monarchy tried to ban the buns altogether but they were too popular. Instead Elizabeth I passed a law allowing bakeries to sell them, but only at Easter and Christmas. (So maybe I was right about the fruitcake.)
These days in the UK hot cross buns are in demand long before Lent. The Brits are now selling hot cross buns as early as January, when they’ve hardly had time to digest their plum pudding. Warburtons, another UK baker, has invented a Hot Cross Bun Loaf, presliced and plastic-wrapped, and sold only during Lent. Such a delicacy this is, apparently, that there is now a Facebook group called A Plea to Warburtons to Make Hot Cross Bun Loaf All Year Round. Isn’t it strange that in a country where religion has, by all reports, declined, hot cross buns are, well, a hot item?
In Australia and New Zealand chocolate-flavored varieties seem to be all the rage. (I wonder if they ship to North America.) One Australian bakery advertises that it prides itself on always using as much fruit as flour. (That sounds much less appealing.) According to the Daily Telegraph, the CEO of one British bakery chain whose sales of the buns were up 10 percent last year considers them “particularly appropriate to consumers in the current climate.” I assume he means they are a snack whose penitential associations suit the world economic crisis better than, say, a jelly doughnut.
Actually, I think what I most like about hot cross buns is that are not particularly commercial, at least not here in the States. You can’t, to my knowledge, buy them at McDonalds or Starbucks. As far as our big chains are concerned, they’re under the radar.
And yet, for those of us who grew up with them, in all their raisin-filled semi-staleness the buns convey a somberness that people have connected with for a long time. They inhabit that ambiguous cultural realm of grassroots customs and practices that connect us to who we are and where we’ve come from. In their annual reappearance the buns tie us to the procession of ordinary mortals who came before us, and to everyone else who seeks them out.
I hear the ones at Amy’s Bread on Ninth Avenue are really good. Must try.
Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net