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Sally Lunn
(Always popular at tea during the cool months) ½ cup sugar 2 eggs 3 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda.
Bake in sheet or muffin pans good steady oven 20 to 30 minutes. When required for use, this tea cake might be cut into thick slices across, toasted, buttered and served very hot.
A plain, quickly mixed tea cake rather than the tall yeast-risen Sally Lunn of English tradition. The original gives ingredients but almost no method, so the order of mixing is left to the cook.
- Mixing orderCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the sifted dry ingredients. The cream of tartar and soda begin working the moment they meet the liquid, so get the batter into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the pre-baking-powder equivalent of about two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder, which can be substituted directly. Sift the soda with the flour so it does not sit in streaks and leave soapy spots.
- "Good steady oven"Around 375F. The phrase means an even, unfalling heat rather than a specific degree, which mattered when the fuel was wood or coal; the recipe allows 20 to 30 minutes for either a sheet or muffin pans, with muffins at the shorter end of that range.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour works; two cups will weigh somewhere between about 8 and 10 oz depending on how the flour is measured.
- SaltNone is listed. Period recipes of this kind often omitted it, salted butter being the usual sort; add half a teaspoon with the flour if using unsalted butter.
- Pan and yieldA batter of this size fits an 8-inch square pan or fills about 12 muffin cups. As a sheet it bakes shallow, which is what makes the thick cross-cut slices possible.
- ServingCut across into slices about an inch thick, toast them, butter generously and serve hot, as the original directs. A cake that has cooled and settled will usually slice more cleanly than one straight from the oven.
The name belongs to Bath, where a Sally Lunn has been sold since the eighteenth century, and the origin story about a girl of that name crying her cakes in the street is traditional rather than documented; another long-standing suggestion derives it from the French solilemme or soleil et lune. The Bath original is a rich yeast bread baked tall in a mould, but by the time this book appeared the name had drifted in North America to cover quick, chemically leavened tea cakes of exactly this kind, mixed in minutes and eaten hot. Cream of tartar and soda had made the yeasted version optional, and the flour miller's cookbook was in the business of showing housekeepers how much could be got out of a bag of flour between one pot of tea and the next.