Sally Lunn
Use recipe for Egg Muffins, using three eggs instead of two, and bake in cake pan instead of muffin pan. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 2 cups flour
This is a cross-reference recipe: it works only if you already have Lowney's Egg Muffins to hand, and the ingredient list printed beneath it does not belong to it. A few things need sorting before you start.
- The stray ingredient listThe half cup butter, cup sugar, one egg and two cups flour do not match any egg-muffin batter; they read as a plain cake or cookie mixture and appear to belong to another recipe on the page. Work from the muffin recipe.
- What the base batter looks likeLowney's Egg Muffins is not reprinted here, so you need the original to make this at all. Adding the third egg makes the batter richer and slightly looser, which is the whole point of the substitution.
- "Cake pan" means a shallow round tinThe book gives no size; a greased 8- or 9-inch round tin is a reasonable reading. Keep the batter shallow, about an inch deep, so the centre sets before the edges dry out.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Muffin batter wants a fairly quick oven, around 400F, but as a single cake allow 25 to 30 minutes rather than the 20 or so the muffins take; test the centre with a skewer.
- It is not the yeast versionTraditional Sally Lunn is a yeast-raised sponge that needs hours of rising. This one rides on the muffin batter's chemical leavening, so mix it quickly, get it into the pan, and into the oven at once.
- Yield and servingOne round cake, six to eight wedges. Serve hot from the pan, split and buttered; quick breads like this are best fresh, and any left over are better split and toasted.
Sally Lunn is an English tea bread, generally traced to Bath in the eighteenth century, and the name's origin is disputed — the popular story about a Bath bun-seller called Sally Lunn is folklore rather than record, and a derivation from the French soleil et lune, for the pale crumb and gold top, is offered just as often and with no better evidence. It travelled early to America, where it became a fixture of Virginia and Maryland hospitality baking, usually raised with yeast in a turban mould. What makes this version interesting is that by 1907 a commercial cookbook — Lowney's existed to sell chocolate, and its bread chapter is workaday filler — could treat Sally Lunn as nothing more than an egg-muffin batter with an extra egg, baked in a round tin. The baking-powder tin had made the long-risen version optional, and the name had loosened into a general label for any sweet, rich, hot tea bread.