HOT CROSS BUNS

"Perhaps no cry - though it is only for one morning - is more familiar to the ears of a Londoner, than that of 'One-a-penny, two a-penny, hot cross buns' on Good Friday". So wrote the Victorian chronicler Henry Mayhew in 1851 in his London Labour and the London Poor. But the days when you could be wooed by such street cries, let alone buy a bun or two for a penny, are of course, long gone. And though our national consumption of these special spicy currant buns marked with a cross and traditionally eaten hot on Good Friday grows each year - more than 170 million of them are usually sold during the Easter season each year - gone too, is much of their associated symbolism.

Putting a cross on a bun is a custom that has been going on for hundreds of years - it even predates Christianity. In ancient Greece, small, cross-marked cakes were eaten at the festival of Artemis, the Olympian goddess of the moon, which was celebrated at the Spring equinox - the quarters formed by the cross representing the quarters of the moon. The Romans also had similar cakes that they ate at the feast of Diana, the goddess of light as well as the hunt. Two petrified loaves incised with a cross, probably in connection with the same pagan festival, were excavated from the ruins of Herculaneum, the town near Naples buried by volcanic ash in AD79. And similar cakes were eaten by the early Saxons in honour of their goddess of spring, Eostre, from whose name our 'Easter' derives. For them, the round shape represented the Sun, and the quarters the four seasons.

Nearer our time the cross on the bun, reinterpreted as the sign of the Holy Cross, was a timely reminder of the Crucifixion - tradition has it that something of the sort was first distributed among the poor at St Alban's Abbey in Hertfordshire on Good Friday way back in the year 1361. A further sacred significance derived from the custom of kneading the buns from the dough used for baking the consecrated Host. This also protected the buns from mould, as Poor Robin's Almanack of 1733 attests:

Good Friday comes this month: the old woman runs
With one a penny, two a penny 'hot cross buns',
Whose virtue is, if you believe what's said,
They'll not grow mouldy like the common bread.

Armed with the cross, the power of the bun knew no bounds. People sometimes hung one or two of them from the ceiling in their homes until the following Good Friday to keep out the Devil and other evil spirits like witches, to protect the house from fire, and to cure ailments such as whooping cough and dysentery. In Letters From England, the poet Robert Southey recorded in 1807 that 'in the province of Herefordshire a pious woman annually makes two upon this day, the crumbs for which are sovereign remedy for diarrhoe'. The bun's power extended even to the sea, where carrying a hot-cross bun or two on board a ship was believed to protect sailors from shipwreck.

In spite of its popularity, the homemade hot-cross bun is becoming increasingly rare. Could it be that would-be bun-bakers are put off by nothing more than the business of making the cross and getting it just right? The author Elizabeth David gives a simple recipe in her book English Bread and Yeast Cookery, and adds these words of wisdom: 'To emphasize the cross, some bakers superimpose strips of candied peel or little bands of ordinary pastry. Both these methods involve unnecessary fiddling work. Neither, in my experience, is successful. There is no need to worry overmuch about the exactitude of the cross. You have made the symbolic gesture. That is what counts'.

BILL HUTCHINGS