The Roman Baths
The great thing about Bath is that it has
such history; you cannot help but find something to be amazed by at the turn of
every street corner.
The famous spa at Bath has attracted people
for millennia – there is archaeological evidence of human settlement going back
10,000 years. Bath was founded in 863BC by a chap called Bladud. Suffering from
leprosy, he had been ostracised from society and found that bathing in the warm,
muddy springs, after seeing pigs doing the same, cured him. It must have put
him in fine fettle because he later went on to become the ninth King of the
Britons and to father King Lear.
Of course it was the Romans that really
transformed the place, creating the town Aqua
Sulis with the baths that are there today in fine working order.
From the point of view of food, however,
Bath really came into its own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when
it was deluged by the holidaying middle
classes. The Roman Baths and Pump Room were restored to their former glories
after centuries of neglect, making Bath the best and most popular of all the
spa towns. This wasn’t just because of its locality to London, or that it was
in a lovely part of England; it was because Bath simply had the best of
everything. It was a trade epicentre: excellent salt marsh lamb from Wales, a
seemingly endless supply of fruit and vegetables from Tewkesbury, cider from
Glastonbury, apricots, cherries and plums from the Cotswolds, cream and junkets
from Devon and Somerset, excellent freshwater fish – especially elvers – from
the Severn Valley as well as sea fish from the ports of Cornwall, all came to
one place. And that was just British produce! I haven’t mentioned the French
brandy, the Spanish wine or the exotic spices from further afield.
All this has made Bath what it is today.
Its food heritage, however, seems to have been boiled down into two things:
Bath buns and Sally Lunns.
I’ve never seen either Bath buns or Sally
Lunns anywhere other than Bath itself, which just goes to show that we still
have regional cooking in an age of a swirling population. I like that you don’t
see them everywhere; it makes eating one a rare treat to be relished. There
are, of course, stories attached to the invention of these enriched breads
which should be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
A bath bun is a large fruit bun, made with
dough similar to that of a Chelsea bun or hot cross bun. The bread dough is
enriched with eggs, sugar and currants. At the bottom of each bun is a lump of
sugar and the freshly-baked bun is finished with a sticky wash, extra currants
and crushed loaf sugar or sugar nibs.
The Bath bun is said to have been invented
by a doctor called William Oliver in the 18th century. After his
patients visited the Roman baths he would give them a nourishing Bath bun. It
was soon apparent that his plan was not working as he expected when he realised
his patients were getting somewhat portly. He withdrew the buns and replaced
them with hard, dry water biscuits.
I must say that I would have become a
hypochondriac if I was one of Oliver’s patients! I would have used any excuse
to get my hands on one. They are so delicious - sweet and sticky and very bad
for you. I can’t put the attractiveness of the Bath bun better than W Chambers,
writing in his Edinburgh Journal of
1855:
The
Bath-bun is a sturdy and gorgeous usurper – a new potentiate, whose
blandishments have won away a great many children, we regret to say, from their
lawful allegiance to the plum-bun. The Bath-bun is not only a toothsome dainty,
but showy and alluring withal. It was easier for ancient mariners to resist the
temptations of the Sirens, than it is for a modern child to turn away from a
Bath-bun…Large, solid, and imposing, it challenges attention, and fascinates
its little purchasers.
We can see from this quote that the Bath
bun was popular, not just in Bath, but England and Scotland, so what happened
to it? Enriched breads are still pretty popular in Britain, even with the
advent of comparatively modern chemically-aerated sponge cakes. Strange.
Here’s the recipe that appears in English
food. It contains no currants, which I think are as essential as the sugar
lumps:
First of all make the ferment – sometimes
called a sponge – a yeasty batter
that gets the microbial metabolism underway quick smart. Mash together 1 ½
ounces of fresh yeast with the same weight
of granulated sugar in a little
water taken from ½ pint of blood-heat
water. Add the remainder of the water and leave until the mixture has begun
to foam, around 20 minutes. As you wait, weigh out 15 ounces of eggs in their
shells and crack them into a bowl. Beat in 5 ounces of strong white bread flour and then add the yeast mixture once
foaming. Cover with cling film or a damp tea towel so that it can rise for
around an hour.
To make the dough, mix into the ferment the
following: 30 ounces of strong white
bread flour, 12 ounces of softened
butter, 3 ounces of granulated sugar,
12 ounces of broken sugar lumps, a
good pinch each of mixed spice and salt and a few drops of lemon juice.
Jane says for us to knead this dough
together; good luck with that, the mixture is more a batter than a dough. I did
this impossible task in my Kitchen Aid. Cover and leave to prove again until
its double the size, which could take 90 minutes or longer with such an
enriched dough weighed down with so many goodies.
Knock back the dough (the best part of the
bread-making process) and ‘shape the dough into pieces the size of a small
Cox’s orange pippin’. Good luck with that, too.
Somehow place the pieces of dough on baking
sheets lined with greaseproof paper, cover with plastic bags and allow to rise
again.
Bake at 200⁰C for around 20 minutes,
swapping trays half way though to achieve an even bake.
When almost baked, make the bun wash by
boiling together 2 ounces of sugar
with 5 tablespoons of water. As soon
as the buns come out of the oven, place on racks and brush with the syrupy
mixture. Lastly, crumble over more broken
sugar lumps.
#419 Cobb’s
Bath Buns. As with many of Jane’s recipes from the
Bread section of the book I didn’t get on very well with this recipe.
The dough was tricky to handle and I couldn’t achieve the proud, round shape I
expect from a Bath bun. They also seemed to stale almost immediately. Bit of a
damp squib for the last recipe in this section. 3.5/10.
