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Sally Lunn
Sift into a pan a pound and a half of flour, put in two ounces of butter warmed in a pint of new milk, one salt-spoon salt, three eggs well beaten, and two table-spoons of good yeast. Mix well together, and put the whole into a tin pan well greased, and set to rise all night. Bake a little brown in a quick oven. Warm the milk and butter over water until the butter is melted; beat the eggs in a two-quart tin-pail, and if the milk is not hot pour it over them. Stir in half the flour, then add the yeast, stirring thoroughly with the rest of the flour. Let rise over night. Some add two tablespoons sugar and use a tea-spoon soda and two of cream tartar instead of the yeast. - Rhoda, Ballsville, Va.
Two sets of instructions are run together here: the first is the older, terse version, the second a more careful restatement of the same dough. Follow the second, which tells you the order that actually matters.
- The measuresA pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups; a pint of new milk is 2 cups; two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. A salt-spoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- "Good yeast"Most likely a liquid barm or homemade yeast, of unreliable and generally weaker strength than modern yeast, though compressed cake yeast was also on sale by this date. Two tablespoons is usually reckoned as roughly one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast for this quantity of flour.
- Milk temperatureWarm the milk only until the butter melts, then let it drop to about 110F before it meets the yeast. The recipe itself says to pour the milk over the beaten eggs only "if the milk is not hot"; poured too hot it will curdle them and kill the yeast.
- It is a batter, not a kneaded doughSally Lunn is beaten, not worked. Stir in half the flour, add the yeast, then the rest, and beat until smooth and elastic. It should be too slack to handle.
- The overnight riseNineteenth-century kitchens went cold at night. In a heated house the dough will over-ferment and taste sour by morning; set it in the coolest room you have, or refrigerate it and let it come back to room temperature before baking.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. For a loaf this rich and this deep, start there and drop to 375F after the first ten minutes so the crust does not set before the centre cooks. It is done at about 190F internal.
- The panThe "tin pan" for Sally Lunn was traditionally a tube or Turk's-head mould, which gets heat into the middle of a wet batter. A 10-inch tube pan or Bundt pan, well greased, is the right substitute.
- The chemically leavened variantA teaspoon of soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. The recipe does not say so, but a chemically leavened batter would be mixed and baked at once rather than left overnight.
- YieldOne large tube loaf, serving ten to twelve. It is meant to be torn or cut in wedges and eaten warm with butter.
Sally Lunn came to America from Bath, England, where the name is traditionally attached to an eighteenth-century baker of that name, though the story is folklore rather than record; other accounts trace it to the French solilemne or to soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the pale crumb under a browned top. Whatever its origin, the bread took particularly firm root in Virginia, where it was baked in a fluted Turk's-head mould and served at tea and breakfast tables through the nineteenth century, and the contributor here writes from Ballsville, in Powhatan County. The tacked-on note about soda and cream of tartar catches the moment when chemical leavening was quietly displacing the overnight yeast sponge in American kitchens.