Hot Cross-Buns on New Year’s Day?
True Buns Wait
Why are Hot Cross Buns on sale on New Year’s Day?
For centuries the the food has been clearly associated with Easter, and that’s still three months away. An 1827 almanac tells us that it is not until Good Friday that in London:
‘[t]he dawn is awakened by a cry in the streets of “Hot-cross-buns; one-a-penny buns, two-a-penny buns; one-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot-cross-buns!”’.
That cry has turned into a popular nursery rhyme today.
It was not just Londoners who waited until early Good Friday morning to get their cross-buns hot. This advertisement from an 1884 American newspaper clearly shows that the price was now one-a-4.2 pennie. Back then, Hot Cross-Buns didn’t commence until 5am on Good Friday.
Perhaps some etymology might help?
The meaning of the first word — hot — is clear, coming from old English hāt, with similar words in German, Dutch and Scandinavian languages. Being freshly baked from the oven, the buns were no doubt hot. Cross is also an Old English word, cros, this time probably from the Latin crux.
The linguistic interest arrives on the word bun. An 1870 source, talking about the hot cross-buns (dropping the first hyphen, it is the buns, not the cross that is hot) is one of the first attempts to trace the bun back to pre-Christian antiquity. It argues that the “very name of bun is but the oblique boun, from bous, the sacred ox, the semblance of whose horns was stamped on the cake.” Crossed horns, it argues, were substituted with s straight cross to allow “for the easier division of the round bun into four equal parts”. The Ancient Greek word for ox is indeed βοῦς (bous), from which we get the English words, butter, bucolic and bulimia — literally ox-hunger.
A helpful piece of correspondence in 1914 to the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts ‘On the etymology of “Bun”’, while rejecting the βοῦς thesis as having ‘no proof … of … ever been used as the name of any cake offered to the gods in place of an actual bullock’. It also considers, and rejects, another easier etymology (and the one today offered by wiktionary) which has ‘bun’ in the sense of baked goods going back to Anglo-Norman bugne (fritter). This gives the modern French, le beignet — or the doughnut.
The correspondent instead proposes that ‘bun’ is a shortening of the Latin libum. The libum is a sort of ancient Roman honey-cheescake that is offered to the gods. The correspondent refers to the illustration from the London Illustrated News of a carbonised libum had been excavated at Pompei. So there is history of crossed-buns lasting a very long time. Note this is double-crossed, so perhaps lasts longer?
Keeping cross-buns around is a actually a superstition that’s recorded in our 1827 source:
‘In the houses of some ignorant people, a Good Friday bun is still kept “for luck,” and sometimes there hands from the cieling (sic) in a hard biscuit-like cake of open cross-work, baked on Good Friday to remain there till displaced on the next Good Friday by one of similar make”
An even earlier attestation of ‘hot-cross-buns’ (from a 1733 Almanac) contains a whole verse telling us that hot-cross-buns won’t go stale at all:
Good Friday comes this month, the old woman runs
With one or two a penny hot-cross-buns,
Whose virtue is, if you believe what’s said,
They’ll not grow mouldy like the common bread.
This archaeological evidence and literary attestation lead me to a supposition — that the cross-buns put out after Christmas aren’t early for next Easter, but rather left over from last Easter! They could be called ‘cold cross-buns’ to distinguish them from the true hot cross-buns that will come out of the oven in the morning, 88 days from now?
Remember — true buns wait.
Show your support for waiting until Easter here…
And unwrap the etymology of other Christmas-adjacent words here…
