c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Throughout the 40 days of Lent _ Monday through Saturday, from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday _ Christians from 6 to 60 are encouraged to do their mortal best to give up their favorite cookies and cakes as an act of penitence.

Nonetheless, many of the faithful nag their local bakers for a special sweet that they, ironically, can get only during this holy season of self-deprivation: hot cross buns.

The buns got their name because they’re scored with the sign of the cross before baking or embellished with a cross of fondant icing after they come out of the oven. “People start asking for them as soon as Valentine’s Day is over,” reports Charly Wurster of Swiss Chalet Bakery in Morristown, N.J., who’s been baking hot cross buns each Lent for 25 years.

To the British, who invented hot cross buns, this Lenten bun binging must serve as just another example of Yankee excess run amok. “They’re not to be eaten before Good Friday,” asserts Janet Millward, an importer based in Rockaway, N.J., who hails from Yorkshire, England. That is, not unless you want to fly in the face of tradition.

Millward plans to bake her own hot cross buns on Good Friday. “It’s not difficult; it’s just like making bread,” she says. “You can’t compare store-bought to homemade.”

And true to tradition, she will share the fruit-filled fruits of her labors with her friends. In so doing, she’ll be carrying on a custom harking back to the 14th century, when the monks of St. Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire, north of London, made enough hot cross buns to share with each other and the poor.

The origin of these tasty treats, which are studded with raisins, currants, and/or candied fruit, may go back even further. Some believe they are descendants of ancient pagan sacramental cakes eaten by Anglo-Saxons in honor of Eastore, the goddess of spring and fertility. When early clergymen couldn’t get the masses to give up their heathen buns, they supposedly gave them a Christian significance by blessing and decorating them with the cross.

To this day, in various parts of England, some clergy distribute hot cross buns to the poor on Good Friday.

One popular belief held that the dried fruit entrapped in the yeast-based dough represented the nails of the Crucifixion; another that if the buns were not imprinted with the cross, the devil would sit on them, thereby cursing them.

Others maintain the buns “derive from the cross-marked Communion wafers consecrated on Good Friday, which Anglo-Saxon priests are known to have kept as medicine for the sick,” writes Charles Kightly in “The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: An Encyclopedia of Living Traditions.”

“All that seems certain,” he continues, “is that they are an essentially English dish, apparently unknown in Scotland and most of Wales until quite recently; and that they have provided welcome relief from Good Friday austerity since at least the 18th century.”

English lore states that bread baked on Good Friday will never go moldy. The bittersweet legend of the widow’s son allegedly proves this: When a widow baker’s son left the East End of London to go off to sea in the 1800s, the mother vowed to bake her son a hot cross bun each Good Friday to eat on his return. She kept her word, hanging them in the window of her bakery, but her son never came back, and she eventually died. In honor of her devotion, every year at midday on Good Friday, a sailor from the British Royal Navy brings a freshly baked hot cross bun to the Widow’s Son, a pub that now stands in place of the widow’s bakery, and hangs it with others, still intact, hung there by sailors every year for over a century.

Even though the British rarely consume hot cross buns before Holy Week, in 1995 Mediawise Statistics found that if all the hot cross buns eaten in Britain were stacked in a pile, it would be almost 400 times taller than Mount Everest.

Margaret Wallis, a London native and regent of her local Daughters of the British Empire in the State of New Jersey, says the buns baked on Good Friday weren’t frosted. Rather, they were imprinted by a metal cross-shaped form.”When they’re baked, the metal cross prevents that section of the bun from browning,” she explains. An old English recipe for hot cross buns reprinted in her organization’s cookbook, “Commonwealth Cooks,” devoutly instructs the user to “read the 27th chapter of St. Matthew (the passion and death of Jesus) while waiting for the dough to rise.”

Not surprisingly, American variations on the British hot cross theme abound. Some are made with a rich dough, using more butter and eggs than usual; others are more austere. Seasonings can include any combination of cloves, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cardamom, or nothing other than salt.

Some are made with currants; others with raisins; or with both. Some are iced with a cross; others scored and glazed all over; others are powdered with sugar. Some are best eaten right out of the oven; others the next day.

Although a popular ditty states hot cross buns cost “one a penny/two a penny,” these days it’s more like 50 to 65 cents each at the local bakery.

So, does your conscience allow you to give into temptation now and follow American practice, or does it tell you to adhere to British custom and hold out until Good Friday?

Back in the 4th century, St. Augustine faced a similar dilemma when he visited Milan, where the natives did not fast on Saturdays as was the custom in Rome. He consulted St. Ambrose, who advised, “When you are at Rome, live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere, live as they live elsewhere.”

Amen _ and pass the hot cross buns.

MJP END FUSCO