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Sally Lunn
1 cake compressed yeast 1 tablespoon sugar 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons melted butter 2 eggs 4 cups sifted flour Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add butter, then flour gradually, eggs well beaten, and last, the salt. Beat until perfectly smooth; pour into well-greased pans; cover and let rise in a warm place, free from draft, until double in bulk-about one and one half hours. Sprinkle granulated sugar over the top and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. Serve hot; break apart with fork.
This recipe will fill two medium-sized cake pans. 1 cake compressed yeast
A yeast-raised batter bread rather than a kneaded loaf — the mixture should pour, not be turned out and worked. A few of the original's terms need translating.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed yeast was about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast. Substitute one 1/4-oz packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast.
- "Lukewarm" milkThe instruction to scald and cool matters: milk hot enough to kill yeast is the usual failure here. Aim for 105–110F, warm to the fingertip and no more.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a shallow cake pan; a deeper pan will need longer, and the bread is done when the centre reads about 200F.
- It is a batter, not a doughFour cups of flour to two cups of milk plus eggs and butter gives a thick, sticky batter. "Beat until perfectly smooth" is the hinge — beat it hard, by mixer or by hand, to develop enough gluten to hold the rise without kneading.
- One rise onlyThe recipe rises the batter directly in the greased pans and bakes from there. Do not punch down and re-pan; the structure depends on that single undisturbed rise. An hour and a half is a guide, not a rule — go by doubled bulk.
- The sugar topSprinkling granulated sugar over the risen batter just before baking gives a thin crackled crust. Do it gently so the surface does not deflate.
- Yield and servingTwo medium cake pans, probably around 8 to 9 inches, serving eight to ten. 'Break apart with fork' spares a hot crumb the compression of a knife. Serve warm with butter.
- Filed oddlyThis appears under Frozen Desserts, which looks like a filing artifact rather than any instruction about the dish. It is a hot bread.
Sally Lunn is generally traced to Bath, England, in the eighteenth century, where the name attached to a large, light, faintly sweet yeast bread served warm with butter at the spa's tea rooms. The origin of the name is disputed: one tradition claims a baker or hawker of that name, another derives it from the French solilemme or from soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the golden top and pale crumb — both to be taken as folklore. The bread crossed to America early and became a fixture of Southern baking, where it evolved into exactly this form: a beaten batter rather than a kneaded dough, poured into pans or a tube mould and raised once. In a loose-leaf cook book of the 1910s and 1920s, compressed yeast sold in foil-wrapped cakes was the ordinary household leaven, delivered fresh and kept only a few days.