Sally Lunn
4 cups Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 3 eggs 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add milk slowly, the eggs well beaten, melted butter. Beat well. Bake in sheet or in muffin pans. The rule makes sixteen muffins.
A baking-powder Sally Lunn, closer to a rich muffin batter than the yeasted Bath original. The book gives no oven temperature, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureFor muffins, 400-425F for 20-25 minutes. Baked as a sheet in a 9x13-inch pan, drop to 375F and allow 30-35 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- "Bake in sheet"This means a shallow rectangular baking pan, not a modern flat cookie sheet. The batter is pourable and needs sides; a 9x13-inch pan or a 9-inch square with the batter halved works.
- Baking powder amountThree teaspoons to four cups of flour is on the low side by current standards; modern practice for this flour-to-liquid ratio is closer to four teaspoons.
- The hinge"Beat well" is written for a batter that must be thin and smooth, but overworking modern all-purpose flour toughens it. Beat only until no dry flour remains, then get it into a hot oven immediately; the leavening starts working the moment the milk goes in.
- Order of mixingAdding the milk to the dry ingredients before the eggs and butter works well in practice: it hydrates the flour without lumps, and putting the melted butter in last keeps it from setting into flecks against cold liquid.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons for four cups of flour makes a lean bread by later Sally Lunn standards, which often ran to half a cup or more. Expect something tender but plain rather than cake-like.
- Yield and servingSixteen muffins, as stated, or one 9x13-inch sheet. Sally Lunn was customarily served hot, split and buttered, and this crumb is at its best the day it is baked.
Sally Lunn began as an English yeast bread, a rich, brioche-like loaf, associated above all with Bath, where a bun of the name has been sold since at least the late eighteenth century. The origin story of a baker named Sally Lunn is traditional rather than documented; another commonly repeated derivation traces the name to the French solilemme or to soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the loaf's golden top and pale crumb. It crossed to America by the late eighteenth century and settled deepest in the Chesapeake and the upland South, where it became a breakfast and supper bread. What you see here is what happened to it after chemical leavening arrived: a milling-company cookbook, selling a branded flour, reprints the old name attached to a batter that can be mixed and baked inside an hour with no rising at all.