There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks at her in horror before replying: ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.’
This phrase goes round and round in my head as I stand agog in my supermarket’s bakery aisles. Where once there might have been one choice of hot cross bun as we hurtle towards Easter – perhaps one ‘standard’ and one ‘luxury’ in the bigger shops – our options now extend as far as the eye can see. And most of them bear no resemblance to what we traditionally consider to be a hot cross bun.
D’Acampo’s objection to the carbonara comment is clearly that if we fiddle with classics, with tradition, sufficiently, then the dish loses meaning – whatever we might call it. The same can be said of our modern interpretation of hot cross buns. If you take away the dried fruit, the citrus, the spice – even the sweetness or the intention for them to be toasted – is it even a hot cross bun at all? Or is it just a bun with a cross on top? What is the essential essence of a hot cross bun? If my grandmother had a pastry cross, would she be a hot cross bun?
This year’s offering of flavoured ‘hot cross’ buns include tiramisu (Asda), rhubarb and custard (Tesco), strawberries and cream (Tesco again), lemon drizzle (Morrisons), apple crumble (Co-op), ‘extremely cheesy’ (Marks and Spencer) and ‘dippy egg’ hot cross buns (also Marks and Spencer), in which cocoa-flavoured buns are filled with a gooey white and yellow chocolate filling that resembles a Creme Egg.
It’s not that we hate the flavours of the traditional hot cross bun. Quite the opposite: we can’t stop putting hot cross bun flavours into places they don’t belong. Sainsbury’s are selling custard cream biscuits with a hot cross bun flavoured filling, Pump Street Chocolate have a hot cross bun flavoured chocolate bar, Prestat are producing a hot cross bun flavoured Easter egg and Fortnum & Mason are selling hot cross bun shortbread. Waitrose have a hot cross bun fudge and Joe & Seph’s have a hot cross bun caramel spread; Vault City Brewery have made a hot cross bun flavoured sour beer, Sipsmith make a hot cross bun flavoured gin and Bird & Blend have a hot cross bun loose leaf tea. Heck, the sausage company, has even produced hot cross bun burgers, pork patties with a ‘touch of cinnamon and a whisper of raisins’. So if we don’t hate the classic HXB flavours, and we love a bun, what is going on?
If you take away the dried fruit, the citrus, the spice – even the sweetness or the intention for them to be toasted – is it even a hot cross bun at all?
The prosaic answer, the obvious answer, is that product development never stands still. Brands and producers are always looking to do something a little bit different that can be pegged to a pre-existing product or celebration. If nothing else, some rent-an-opinion food journalist will write a column about them for The Spectator, giving that brand free passive marketing. Once you’ve explored a St Clements hot cross bun or one that’s heavy on the marmalade, where is there to go apart from tomato and oregano, or fondant chocolate eggs?
But let me offer a brief historical defence to our hot cross bun diversification: buns with crosses cut into them predate Christianity. There’s a theory that the Saxons celebrated Eostre, the goddess of fertility and the dawn, with spiced buns, and crossed buns were even found in the remains at Pompei. Later, on a Good Friday in the 14th century in St Albans, Brother Thomas Rocliffe, a monk, gave out buns to the local poor. This Alban bun was spiced with grains of paradise (similar to cardamom) and pocked with currants, and had a cross cut into the dough. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the sale of spiced buns and breads was made illegal other than on Good Friday, Christmas and at burials. The ban was lifted by the early 17th century, but by that point, spiced buns had become strongly associated with Good Friday. It wasn’t until 1773 that the first reference was made to ‘hot cross buns’ in Poor Robin’s Almanack. And it was as late as the end of the 19th century that the distinctive paste crosses replaced scored dough. It’s hard to be a traditionalist when the traditions change so much over time, both in meaning and form.
What has been consistent, amid the change of festival, the change of name, the change of design and the change of components, is that the small buns bear some kind of cross, and are eaten in celebration around springtime. If that’s all we can point to for hot cross bun stability, then even the most absurd flavour combinations, the seemingly least traditional version of these buns, are fair game.
And anyway, I have a guilty secret: I have become emotionally, if not physically, dependent on M&S’s ‘extremely chocolatey’ hot cross buns for the past two years. Sure, I make the classic version; they’re the ones I post on Instagram and serve to my family. But it’s the chocolate buns I’ve stockpiled in my freezer, aware that in a few short weeks they will disappear from the shelves for another year. If I’m being honest, despite my advocacy for the variations, I know that these aren’t ‘real’ hot cross buns; their crosses can’t deceive me. There’s no spice, no zest, no sultanas and – crucially – they’re packed full of chocolate. These are hot cross buns in shape and hope only. But the heart wants what the heart wants. And my heart wants six of them, one after the other, toasted, with very salty butter.
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