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Sally Lunn Muffins
1 quart flour, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 1 tablespoonful butter or lard, 1 egg, 1 1/4 pints milk. Sift together flour, sugar, salt, and powder; rub in shortening; add egg (beaten) and milk; mix into rather firm batter; muffin-pans to be cold and well greased, then fill two-thirds. Bake in hot oven fifteen minutes.
A plain quick-bread batter standing in for the yeast-raised Sally Lunn. Two numbers in it need attention before you start: the liquid and the leavening.
- Quart of flourA quart is a volume measure, not a weight: about 4 cups sifted, roughly 1 lb (450-500 g). Older books measured dry goods by the quart as a matter of course.
- 1 1/4 pints milkThat is 2 1/2 cups. Against 4 cups of flour this is wetter than the "rather firm" batter the recipe describes. Hold back part of the milk and add it only as needed; the batter should drop heavily from the spoon.
- Leavening is lightTwo teaspoons of baking powder to a quart of flour is well under modern practice, which runs about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour; the beaten egg supplies some further lift. Expect a close crumb unless you increase it to 3-4 teaspoons.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F. Fifteen minutes suits a standard muffin tin; a larger tin will want longer.
- Cold, greased pansThe instruction is explicit: the tin is to be cold and well greased before it is filled two-thirds full. The recipe gives no reason for it.
- ShorteningOne tablespoon of butter or lard for the whole batch is very little fat, so these are best eaten fresh. Butter gives better flavour; lard is often said to give a slightly more tender crumb.
- YieldThis quantity of batter will more than fill one standard twelve-cup tin two-thirds full. Serve hot, split, the day they are baked.
Sally Lunn proper is an English sweet bread associated with Bath, raised with yeast, rich with butter and eggs, and baked as a single tall loaf or in a fluted mould. Its name is usually traced either to a baker of that name selling in Bath in the eighteenth century, a story that is traditional rather than documented, or to the French solilemme, sometimes glossed as sun-and-moon for the browned top over a pale crumb. By the time American household compilations of the late nineteenth century were printing recipes like this one, the name had detached from the method: chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, and "Sally Lunn" had come to mean any light, slightly sweetened breakfast bread. Putting it in the muffin chapter, baked in individual pans in a quarter of an hour, shows how thoroughly baking powder reshaped the American breakfast table.