Black Bun: Scotland's Hogmanay Fruit Cake in Pastry

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The recipes are well documented: Mrs Frazer (1791), Meg Dods (1826) and F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929) give dated versions, and the Scottish National Dictionary dates the name. The weak point is the origin story. That black bun "is" the old Twelfth Night cake, transferred to Hogmanay when the Kirk banned Christmas, comes from McNeill and is repeated by The Oxford Companion to Food. It fits the evidence but is an interpretation. The Companion's own entries also disagree with one another: its fruit cake entry dates black bun to "the late Middle Ages", while its black bun entry traces the bun only to eighteenth-century plum cake. No medieval recipe or record of the bun is known.

What black bun is

established A modern black bun has two parts. The filling is mostly fruit: large raisins and currants, chopped candied peel and blanched almonds, bound with a little flour and sugar, heavily spiced and moistened with egg or buttermilk and brandy. This is packed into a tin lined with thin short pastry, covered with a pastry lid, pricked or skewered right through, and baked slowly for several hours. It keeps for weeks and is usually made well before New Year. It is served in thin slices, often with whisky.

established The old family recipe in F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929) gives a sense of the proportions. Two pounds each of currants and stoned Muscatel raisins, half a pound each of almonds and mixed peel, go into one pound of flour with only four ounces of Demerara sugar. The spices are generous: half an ounce each of ground ginger and of cloves or cinnamon, a teaspoon of Jamaica pepper (allspice) and half a teaspoon of black pepper. A little baking soda raises it, and buttermilk or beaten egg with a tablespoon of brandy binds it. The crust is a simple paste of a pound of flour rubbed with half a pound of butter. The bun bakes for three hours or more. McNeill adds that huff paste, the plain flour-and-water casing once used to seal food in the oven, could be used instead.

established The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) notes that every Scottish baker who makes the bun has their own spice mix, from strongly peppery versions to milder cinnamon ones, and that black treacle, now common, is a modern addition absent from early recipes. It also notes that the bun may be round or loaf-shaped. In the Companion's words, by the late nineteenth century the bun "could almost be described as an English Christmas pudding in a crust".

From plum cake to bun

established In eighteenth-century Scotland the word "bun" meant something like a festive plum cake, "plum" in the old sense of any dried fruit. Sir John Sinclair, in his Observations on the Scottish Dialect (1782), defined bun as "an old word for plumcake or twelfthcake", as quoted by McNeill. The Scotsman reports that Elizabeth Cleland's A New and Easy Method of Cookery (Edinburgh, 1755) has a recipe headed "A Plumb-cake or bun".

established The earliest recipe with a casing is Mrs Frazer's, in The Practice of Cookery (Edinburgh, 1791), which McNeill reprints. It is a bread, not a cake. Half a peck of flour is worked with a pound of butter, warm water and three gills of yeast into a dough, and a third is cut off for the cover. Three pounds each of raisins and currants, almonds, candied orange and citron peel, cloves, cinnamon and ginger are kneaded into the rest. The fruited dough is wrapped in the cover, bound with paper to hold its shape, baked in a quick oven and glazed with egg.

established Meg Dods, in The Cook and Housewife's Manual (1826), gave the bun as "Scotch Christmas Bun", still a spiced, fruited bread dough wrapped in plain dough. She wrote that it was made by the leading Edinburgh bakers in the weeks before Christmas, and that buns weighing from four to sixteen pounds or more were sent "from the depots of Littlejohn, Mackie and others" to many parts of the three kingdoms. The Companion gives the top weight as 16 lb (8 kg); 16 lb is in fact about 7.3 kg.

shared Why "bun" rather than "cake"? The Companion suggests the term may have been adopted to avoid confusion with the Scots use of "cake" for a hard oatcake, as in the "Land o' Cakes". That is a reasonable guess. It is not documented.

How it turned black

established The bun changed during the nineteenth century. As dried fruit and sugar became cheaper, the filling grew richer and darker. The Oxford Companion to Food explains that the bread dough was eventually abandoned, very little flour was added to the spice and fruit, and the whole was wrapped in short crust. Chemical raising agents replaced yeast, which struggled to lift so heavy a mix; McNeill's family recipe uses baking soda with buttermilk or egg.

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), explains why Scottish baking grew richer in this period. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cheaper spices and dried fruit, brought to Europe by the Dutch East India Company and traded to Scotland through the Netherlands, had already widened the housewife's baking repertoire. In the eighteenth century Glasgow became Britain's largest importer of raw and refined sugar, and Hope sees the fall in sugar prices that followed as the probable origin of the Scottish sweet tooth; recipe books of the time show more and more sweet puddings, cakes and preserves. Towards the end of the century, she adds, the new stone houses of the rural middle class had coal-burning ranges with proper ovens, which made home baking of rich cakes practical. The link from these trends to the bun in particular is her general picture, not a documented history of the bun.

established Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, published as a book in December 1878, records the bun in its new form. Describing the city before New Year, he wrote that confectioners displayed "stacks of Scotch bun—a dense, black substance, inimical to life" alongside "full moons of shortbread". He still called it Scotch bun.

shared The Companion says that the name black bun seems to have come into use after Stevenson's description. The Scottish National Dictionary supports a date around then: its earliest quotation is from J. L. Waugh's Dumfriesshire stories of about 1900, "I'se warrant ye hae nae black bun or currant loaf to first-fit wi'." Whether Stevenson's phrase caused the name or merely recorded what people already saw is not known.

Twelfth Night, the Reformation and Hogmanay

shared McNeill states plainly that black bun "is the old Scottish Twelfth Cake, which was transferred to Hogmanay after the banning of Christmas and its subsidiary festival, Uphalieday, or Twelfth Night, by the Reformers." The Oxford Companion to Food repeats this. The idea is attractive. Twelfth Night cakes in England and France were rich fruited or yeasted cakes containing a bean, and whoever found it became king or queen of the revels. McNeill notes that George Buchanan wrote a Latin epigram on Mary Beaton's choice as Queen of the Bean at the Twelfth Tide revels at Holyrood, so the custom was known at the Scottish court in the 1560s. Sinclair's gloss of 1782 links "bun" with Twelfth cake directly.

shared But there are gaps. No Scottish source records a Twelfth cake being moved to New Year, and Meg Dods in 1826 still called the bun a Christmas bun, made in the weeks before Christmas. It is likely that the bun simply belonged to the whole midwinter season, which in Scotland ran from Christmas to Handsel Monday as the "Daft Days", and that it settled on Hogmanay as New Year became the main holiday. The site's Hogmanay card treats the transfer as a likely explanation, not a fact, and this card does the same.

shared The dates of the ban also need care. The Companion, citing the Scottish food writer Catherine Brown, says observance of Christmas was banned by the Church authorities in 1649. The legislative landmark usually cited is the Parliament of Scotland's act of 1640 abolishing the Yule holiday, rescinded in 1661, though the Kirk's hostility to Christmas began with the Reformation of 1560 and lasted long after. Christmas Day did not become a public holiday in Scotland until 1958.

established The Companion's Hogmanay entry, drawing on Brown, adds that until the Second World War Scots did not generally keep Christmas Day as a holiday, so Hogmanay did duty for Christmas, Yule and Twelfth Night as well as New Year. It also notes that the word Hogmanay is not recorded before the early seventeenth century and probably comes from a Norman French form of the Old French aguillanneuf, a New Year's Eve cry for a gift.

First-footing

established Black bun's best-known role is in first-footing. After midnight on Hogmanay the first visitor to cross a threshold brought gifts for luck, and food was part of the exchange. McNeill's calendar of festival dishes lists for Hogmanay oatcake farls and cheese, shortbread, black bun, currant loaf and ankerstock gingerbread, oranges, and the hot spiced "het pint" of ale, eggs and whisky carried round Edinburgh and Glasgow. Waugh's line of about 1900, about having "nae black bun or currant loaf to first-fit wi'", shows the bun as the expected thing to carry.

established McNeill describes the Scots currant loaf, a plainer fruit loaf baked in the same kind of crust, as "a poor relation of Black Bun", used at Hogmanay where black bun was too rich or too dear. The Companion notes that in many households the bun is eaten with whisky, while it is equally at home in houses where whisky is never drunk.

Relatives at home and abroad

established The idea of a fruited dough sealed in a plain one is old and was once widespread. The Oxford Companion to Food compares black bun with the Banbury cake, whose first recipe, by Gervase Markham in 1615, divided a rich spiced yeast dough into two, kneaded currants into one half and sandwiched it between thin layers of the plain half. The Companion says Scotland's black bun is a survivor of this family. It notes that some English regional simnel cakes were also fruited yeast doughs encased in a crust, "a form reminiscent of the Scottish black bun", and it sees a family likeness between the bun and the Dresden Stollen, another rich fruited bread of the Christmas season.

established Within Scotland, McNeill gives the Hawick "banna", "a rich currant cake in a paste cover", and the Scots currant loaf. The Selkirk bannock, a yeasted fruit bread without a crust, is closer to the early yeasted bun than the modern one is.

established The English Christmas cake went a different way. The Companion records that the formula of fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing was first put into print by Elizabeth Raffald in The Experienced English Housekeeper, and that yeast had largely disappeared from English cake-making by the nineteenth century. Black bun kept its crust instead of gaining icing.

Black bun today

shared Black bun is still made by Scottish bakers and home cooks, though it is less common at New Year than it was. The Scotsman reported that the Borders bakery Alex Dalgetty & Sons, known for its Selkirk bannocks, made around 6,000 black buns before the festive season. Figures of this kind are the bakery's own and are not independently checked.

shared The bun also travelled with emigrants. Annette Hope, writing in 1987, found that in Canada black bun, scones, gingerbread and shortbread were still baked as a statement that a family's history went back beyond the early days of settlement, even when the recipes had been changed to suit local taste.

• Stevenson never wrote "black bun". He called it Scotch bun, "a dense, black substance, inimical to life".
• The earliest recorded use of the name black bun, from around 1900, is about first-footing.
• In 1791 the bun was a yeast bread wrapped in more bread dough, not a fruit filling in pastry.
• Edinburgh bakers in the 1820s sent buns weighing up to sixteen pounds or more across Britain.
• Black treacle is a modern addition; early buns took their darkness from fruit and spice.
• Old recipes include black pepper and allspice as well as ginger and cinnamon.
• The cheaper Scots currant loaf was McNeill's "poor relation of Black Bun".
• Mary Beaton was chosen Queen of the Bean at a Twelfth Night revel at Holyrood, a custom often linked to the bun's origins.

• Disputed: Black bun is the old Twelfth Night cake, moved to Hogmanay. McNeill and The Oxford Companion to Food say so, and Sinclair's 1782 gloss of "bun" as plum cake or Twelfth cake supports it. It is a likely explanation, but no record shows the transfer happening.
• Myth: Black bun dates from the Middle Ages. The Companion's fruit cake entry says "the late Middle Ages", but its black bun entry traces the bun only to eighteenth-century plum cake. No medieval recipe or record of the bun is known.
• Myth: Robert Louis Stevenson called it "black bun". He wrote "Scotch bun" in 1878. The name black bun is first recorded around 1900.
• Myth: The original bun was a fruit cake in a pastry case. The earliest recipes, such as Mrs Frazer's of 1791, were yeasted bread doughs wrapped in more bread dough. The pastry case came later.
• Myth: The biggest buns of the 1820s weighed 8 kg. The Companion gives Meg Dods's top weight of 16 lb as 8 kg; 16 lb is about 7.3 kg.
• Disputed: "Bun" was chosen to avoid confusion with oatcake. The Companion suggests "cake" meant a hard oatcake in Scots. It is a reasonable guess, not a documented fact.
• Disputed: When Christmas was banned in Scotland. The Companion gives 1649 and the Church authorities. The legislative landmark usually cited is the Parliament of Scotland's act of 1640, rescinded in 1661.