Bunns
1 pint of potato yeast. 4 ounces of sugar. 4 ounces of butter. 1 egg and as much flour as will make a soft dough. Make as Sally-Lunn and bake in rolls.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in nineteenth-century Virginia manuscripts: it assumes you have a live potato yeast on the shelf and that you already know the Sally Lunn method. Both need filling in.
- Potato yeast, and what replaces itPotato yeast was a home-kept liquid starter of boiled mashed potato, sugar, salt and water, kept going from batch to batch. A pint of it is 2 cups of liquid as well as the leavening, so it counts in both columns: for a modern batch use about 2 cups of lukewarm milk or water plus 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast. The trade is likely flavour: such starters tended to be mildly sour, and are often credited with a softer crumb.
- Weights to volumesFour ounces of sugar is about 1/2 cup; 4 ounces of butter is 1 stick. This recipe states both by weight, and a scale still gives the truer result.
- "As much flour as will make a soft dough"With 2 cups of liquid expect roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour. Stop while the dough is still slightly tacky and only just clears the bowl; these are enriched rolls and a stiff dough bakes dry.
- The Sally Lunn methodCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the egg, then work in the yeast liquid and flour alternately to a soft dough. Let it rise until doubled, knock back, shape into rolls, then prove again until puffy before baking.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake the rolls at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until well browned and hollow-sounding underneath.
- SaltNone is listed. Potato starters were often salted, which may be why, but the recipe does not say. Add about 1 1/2 teaspoons with the flour or the bunns will taste flat.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 rolls, depending on size. They are best the day they are baked and stale quickly, as all butter-and-egg breads of this type do.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree in 1878 from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end in an initial rather than a full method: they were written down between women who had all made the thing before. This one leans on Sally Lunn, the sweet yeast-raised bread that was a fixture of Virginia tea tables and appears elsewhere in the same book, and simply redirects the same dough into rolls. The reliance on potato yeast dates it: commercial compressed and dry yeasts were spreading in American cities through the 1870s and 1880s, but a household starter fed on potato water seems, on the evidence of the recipes themselves, to have remained a common means of leavening in rural Virginia kitchens, and its strength varied enough that rising times were judged by eye rather than by clock. The older spelling "bunns" was still in casual use in the period and carries no distinction from "buns."