Sally Lunn
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls butter, melted 4 cups sifted flour 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful salt SALLY LUNN is one of the most popular of the fancy Breads, and makes a delicious accompaniment to tea. It should be broken apart with a fork; never cut with a knife. Serve hot.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add butter, then flour, eggs well beaten, and the salt. Beat until perfectly smooth. Pour into well-greased pans.
Cover and let rise in a warm place, free from draught, until double in bulk--about one and one-half hours.
Sprinkle one tablespoonful granulated sugar over top and bake twenty minutes in hot oven. This recipe will fill two medium cake pans.
A batter, not a dough. Nothing is kneaded or shaped; it is beaten smooth and poured into cake tins, which makes it one of the least laborious things in the booklet.
- Beat, do not kneadFour cups of flour against two cups of milk and two eggs gives a thick batter rather than a dough. Beat it until perfectly smooth with a wooden spoon or a mixer paddle. A dough hook has nothing to take hold of, and kneading is neither possible nor wanted.
- Scalding the milkEvery milk recipe in this booklet begins by scalding and cooling it, a holdover from raw milk, which was widely held to slacken a dough as well as to carry bacteria. Pasteurised milk needs none of it. Warm the milk to about 100°F (38°C) and carry on from there.
- One rise, in the tinsThe batter goes straight into greased tins and rises there once. There is no knocking back and no second shaping, so the rise in the tin is the only one it gets. Judge it by the batter coming up near the rim and quivering when the tin is moved, not by the hour and a half, which assumes a cool kitchen.
- Two medium cake pansRound tins of eight or nine inches, and deep ones. Fill each a little over half: a yeast batter roughly doubles, which a creamed cake batter does not, and this one will climb.
- A hot oven, brieflyTwenty minutes in a hot oven means roughly 400°F (200°C). The tablespoon of sugar scattered over the top will be dark before the centre is set if the oven runs hotter than that, so check at fifteen.
- Serve it hot, and mean itBreaking it apart with a fork rather than cutting it is practical advice as much as manners: the crumb is soft and open, and a knife compresses it flat. There are also only four tablespoons of butter to four cups of flour, which is modest for an enriched bread, so it stales within the day. Whatever is left over is better toasted than kept.
Whatever its beginnings, the Sally Lunn that reached a booklet like this one had become a batter bread. The English form is a shaped risen bun, baked, split and buttered; here it is poured into cake tins, which is how the name settled in American cookery, and particularly in the South, where Sally Lunn appears as a soft, high loaf often baked in a tube pan. The booklet treats it as a fancy bread rather than a cake and gives it the manners of one: served hot, torn with a fork, never cut, alongside tea. Those directions carry more than they appear to. A loaf served torn is a loaf served at the table among people all taking their piece at the same moment, which places it at the tea table rather than in the bread box, and explains why a recipe this simple sits in the ornamental half of the book.