Ever since Billy Bunter showed a decided liking for them and his figure showed a decided tendency after them, buns have been regarded as a soft option by dietary hard-liners.
“Buns.” they shriek and go into culinary shock.
Yet this doughy darling of childhood still penetrates the more sophisticated gullets of maturity.
All over the world there are people longing for a bash at buns.
People are always promoting something in this competitive society. Yet bun promotion has reached a stalemate. And. even if they are stale, mate, you can always freshen them up in the oven.
Already the word bunfight is part of the language, indicating a culinary donnybrook or a festival of greed.
The mob has certainly put the finger on buns!
I like to ask for a bun when I’m dining, just to see the waiter’s look of cultured horror, to feel the electric stillness of the tables next to me. I know that petrified people are sitting with forks and knives frozen, with belief suspended. This kind of caper belongs at the quick-lunch counter. The fellow should be ejected.
But the truth is, they all want one. They are frustrated bun fanciers, the kind who rush to a bun counter, knowing full well there is no counter to a bun.
I know people who have driven kilometres looking for a country bakery, their nostrils flaring for the first scent of that approaching ecstasy.
They fall out of their cars in a screaming mob, rushing into the shop, tossed hither and thither by the currants of their greed.
Yet the bakery at bun time is an exercise in nostalgia for me. In my youth, while others were stoning sparrows or encountering girls. I would race to the local bakery and slam my passionate pence on the counter clasping the new buns with all the rapture of one feeling the sensuous, still-warm flesh.
I would sit up a nearby creek, the one I was continually associated with in later demanding years, savouring each floury crumb and the faint granular deposits of their sugared summits. Birds waited hopefully on near- by boughs but there was nought for their comfort.
Other children saved pennies in school banks and lived virtuously on cheese sandwiches.
Did you bank your money today, dear?
Well, you might say I invested it with an eye to the growth factor.
I promised I would forgo buns but of course I only gave lip service to their pleading.
I still notice things. For instance, the techniques of eating the modern cream bun lack the bold, straightforward method we used.
People timidly separate the bun’s halves, demurely eating the cream and jam filling by instalments instead of the glorious, head-on, engagement. with the white cream spraying past the ears!
Max Fatchen