Home › Breads › Sally Lunn No. 1
Sally Lunn No. 1
1 pt. flour. 2 tablespoons sugar. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 scant cup milk. 3 tablespoons butter. 1 cake yeast. 1/4 cup warm water. 1 egg. Sift flour, sugar and salt. Warm milk and melt into this the butter. Stir in flour, add yeast after it is dissolved. Beat egg separately and add to mixture. Pour all this into a buttered cake pan. Let stand until double its bulk. Brush with melted butter, sprinkle with sugar and bake in miderate oven. Serve warm, cut into squares.
A yeast-raised batter bread rather than a kneaded loaf, so the hinge is temperature: the milk-and-butter mixture must be no warmer than lukewarm when the yeast goes in, or the rise stalls.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here, so a pint means 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose. The recipe sifts the flour with the sugar and salt; whether it was measured before or after sifting is not stated, so err on the light side.
- One cake yeastA cake of compressed yeast of this era was roughly half to two-thirds of an ounce, sizes varied. Substitute one 1/4-oz packet of active dry or instant yeast, dissolved in the 1/4 cup warm water as written.
- Milk temperatureWarm the milk only enough to melt the butter, then let it cool to about 100-110F before adding the dissolved yeast. Butter melts near 95F, so scalding milk is unnecessary and will kill the yeast.
- "Miderate oven""Miderate" -- A typesetting slip for moderate, which in this period means roughly 350 to 375F. Reckon on about 25 to 30 minutes in an 8-inch square pan, judging by a deep gold top rather than the clock.
- The panA "buttered cake pan" is unspecified; an 8- or 9-inch square tin suits the instruction to cut into squares. The mixture is a soft batter, poured rather than shaped, as the recipe says.
- Rising timeDoubling takes about an hour to an hour and a half in a warm kitchen, and longer in a cold one. Go by bulk, not the clock.
- Sugar toppingBrush with melted butter and sprinkle sugar just before baking, not before the rise, or the surface dries and the sugar dissolves into a syrup.
- YieldOne pan, cut into squares; the recipe gives no count. It is best within a few hours of baking; day-old Sally Lunn is better split and toasted.
Sally Lunn is an English batter bread associated with Bath, where it was sold as a rich tea bread in the eighteenth century; the name is often said to come from a baker or street seller of that name, and sometimes from the French soleil et lune, though neither account is documented and the second looks like later folk etymology. The bread crossed to America early and became particularly entrenched in Virginia and the wider South, where it was baked in a tube pan or a skillet and served hot at breakfast or tea. Mrs. Wilson, who wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and published this book in the years just after the First World War, gives two versions. What marks the recipe as a Sally Lunn rather than a plain roll dough is the proportion of butter, egg and milk to flour, which gives a texture nearer cake than bread and explains the instruction to serve it warm, cut into squares.