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Sally Lunn
1/2 cup shortening 1/4 cup sugar 2 teaspoons baking-powder 2 cups flour 1 cup milk 1 egg Cream the shortening with the sugar. Mix and sift together the flour and baking-powder and add to the creamed mixture, alternating with the milk. Add the beaten egg and bake in a loaf or in muffin-pans, in a moderate oven (350 degrees-400 degrees F.). When fresh huckleberries are in season, one cup stirred in just before baking will be an agreeable addition.
A plain baking-powder Sally Lunn, closer to a sweet muffin batter than to the yeast-raised original. The method is straightforward; the only vagueness is timing, which the book omits entirely.
- OvenThe given range of 350-400F is wide. Use 350F for a loaf and 400F for muffins, which need the higher heat to spring.
- TimingNo time is given. Muffins take about 20 minutes, a loaf in a standard 8x4-inch pan 40 to 50 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre.
- ShorteningAt this date this meant lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco. Butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Order of mixingAs written the egg goes in last, after the flour. Beating it in at that point risks toughening the crumb, so fold rather than beat, or add the egg to the creamed sugar and shortening first.
- FlourA softer, lower-protein flour than modern all-purpose may well have been what was to hand; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling rather than scooping, and stop mixing the moment the flour disappears.
- HuckleberriesWild huckleberries are hard to buy now; blueberries substitute directly. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in to keep them from sinking.
- YieldAbout 12 muffins or one small loaf. Best eaten warm the day it is baked, split and buttered.
Sally Lunn is properly a rich, yeast-raised sweet bread baked in a tall fluted mould, recorded in England by the late eighteenth century and long associated with Bath; the name is usually traced, without documentation, to a bun-seller of that name, and a rival tradition derives it from a French phrase for the bread's pale-and-gold top, though that too is undocumented. It travelled to the American South, where it became a standard supper bread served hot in slices. By the time this book appeared, chemical leavening had recast many such breads into quick versions, and the Sally Lunn here keeps only the name and the loaf shape of its yeasted ancestor.