Hot Cross Buns or Kulich: Two Easter Breads

Closer than almost anybody notices. Both are enriched yeast doughs — flour raised with yeast and then loaded with butter, egg, sugar, dried fruit and warm spice — baked for the same week of the year by Christian traditions that split long before either recipe was written down. If you handed a baker from one tradition the other's dough, they would know exactly what they were holding.

Where they part is shape and moment. The British bun is small, flat-topped, marked with a cross of flour paste and eaten warm and split; the Eastern European loaf is tall, baked in a narrow tin so it rises like a column, and finished with a white glaze and a scatter of colour on top. One is breakfast. The other is the centre of a table.

Because of what each has to survive. A hot cross bun is baked, cooled and eaten within a day or so, so there is no reason for it to be anything but hand-sized. A kulich is carried to a church to be blessed and then kept on the table through a long meal and often several days of visitors, which asks for a loaf that can be cut into rounds, offered a slice at a time and still look like itself on the third morning.

The height is also a workload. A tall, heavily enriched dough rises slowly because fat and sugar both slow yeast down, so a kulich is a two-day job of several rises rather than an afternoon.

Hot cross buns belong to Good Friday and kulich to Easter Sunday, and the gap between them is the point rather than an accident. The bun is a Lenten food marked with the cross of the crucifixion, traditionally eaten on the day of mourning. The kulich arrives at the other end of the weekend, after the fast is over, which is exactly why it is so rich: it is the first indulgent thing on the table after weeks without.

In practice the British supermarket has moved buns into January and the Eastern European tradition has not moved at all. If you are keeping both, the honest order is buns through Lent and a kulich on the Sunday, which is what a mixed household here usually does.

No, neither of them, and it is better to say so plainly than to leave you asking. Hot cross buns are not made here: a bun is a bakery product sold by the half dozen on one morning of the year, and this is a kitchen that takes orders ahead and makes one thing at a time. Kulich and paska are not made here either, in either sense of the word paska — the bread or the curd pyramid.

If what you want for Easter is a cake rather than a bread, the Easter page has that. The table below gives the sizes and what each one feeds, which is the question that actually decides the order.