04/05/2026
Happy and blessed Easter to everyone! Here is a little food lore for you to enjoy!
Every Easter, millions of people eat a spiced bun marked with a cross without knowing that the tradition started with a single monk in 14th century England who was giving them away free to the poor, with free wine on the side.
In 1361, Brother Thomas Rocliffe, a monk attached to the refectory at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, began baking small sweet spiced cakes marked with a cross and distributing them to anyone who came to the abbey door on Good Friday, along with a customary basin of sack, which was a fortified wine similar to sherry.
The account of this, recorded in a copy of Ye Booke of St Albans and later reported in the Herts Advertiser in 1862, notes that the cakes so pleased the palates of the people who received them that they became talked about across the country, and various were the attempts to imitate the cakes of Father Rocliffe, but the recipe was kept within the walls of the Abbey. The bun became known as the Alban Bun, named after the abbey's patron saint, and it is the direct ancestor of every hot cross bun eaten this weekend.
What happened next is one of the stranger chapters in British food history. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1541, the spiced buns were seen as a Catholic practice from the old religious order and fell under suspicion. The London clerk of markets eventually issued an edict permitting the buns to be sold only at funerals, at Christmas, or on Good Friday.
Local bakers kept the tradition alive in spite of the restrictions, and the bun slowly spread across England over the following centuries, losing the free wine along the way, which is genuinely a shame.
St Albans Cathedral still bakes the Alban Bun today using a recipe closely guarded as a cathedral secret. The known ingredients include flour, eggs, fresh yeast, currants, and grains of paradise, a medieval African spice that was the dominant warming spice in English cooking before black pepper became cheap and widely available. The cross is cut into the top with a knife rather than piped on, which is how Brother Thomas would have made it in 1361. I am releasing my full recreation of the medieval Alban Bun recipe for Easter this weekend, made with grains of paradise and the traditional knife-cut cross.
from History Eats
