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Sally Lunn
1 quart of flour 1 tablespoon baking powder 1 tablespoon butter 1 quart warm milk 2 tablespoons sugar Pinch of salt Sift flour and baking powder together, then stir in the milk in which the butter has been melted. If too stiff, add milk until it is as light as a cup cake batter. Bake in a quick oven.
A baking-powder Sally Lunn of the American type — no yeast, no eggs, and almost no instructions. The proportions as printed need a second look before you turn the oven on.
- The flour-to-milk ratio is suspectA quart of flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb); a quart of milk is also 4 cups. Equal volumes give a pourable batter closer to crepe consistency than the "light as a cup cake batter" the recipe itself asks for. The line "if too stiff, add milk" suggests the writer expected to start with a thick batter, not a thin one, and other quick Sally Lunn recipes generally call for considerably less liquid than this. Begin with 2 cups of milk and add more only to reach a heavy, droppable batter.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At that heat a batter this rich in milk sets fast at the edge, so a tube or ring pan of about 9 inches, or an 8-inch square, is a safe choice; reckon on 25 to 35 minutes and test.
- Baking powder quantityA tablespoon to a quart of flour is on the low side by modern standards, where about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour is the norm. If your baking powder is more than six months open, replace it; there is no yeast and no egg here, so it is the only lift in the recipe.
- No eggs, by designNo eggs -- the omission of the eggs found in most Sally Lunn recipes makes the crumb closer to a plain milk bread than to the buttery, almost cake-like original. Adding two beaten eggs brings it back toward the classic if that is what you want.
- Melt the butter into the milk, not the flourThe instruction is easy to skim past. Warm the milk, melt the tablespoon of butter in it, and add the two together; stirring cold butter into flour gives you biscuit texture instead.
- Mix minimallyOnce the liquid meets the flour the baking powder is working. Stir until just combined, lumps and all, and get it into the pan — overworking a batter this wet develops gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Yield and servingA quart of flour makes a generous loaf serving 8 to 10. Sally Lunn is meant to be eaten hot, torn or sliced thick, with butter; it stales within hours and is best split and toasted the next day.
Sally Lunn is a Bath bread, and the name is one of the well-worn puzzles of English food writing. The story most often repeated traces it to a young baker named Sally Lunn selling rich rolls in Bath in the late eighteenth century; a rival tradition derives it from the French soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the loaf's golden top and pale crumb. Neither is documented, and both should be treated as tradition rather than fact. The earliest Bath references describe a rich teacake, though the exact enrichment is not documented. The version here belongs to the American afterlife of the dish: once chemical leaveners became reliable household staples in the nineteenth century, Southern and Midwestern cookbooks reworked Sally Lunn as a baking-powder batter bread baked in a ring mould, keeping the name and the hot-from-the-oven serving while dropping the hours of rising.