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Sally Lunn
2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 3/4 cup milk 2 eggs 2 tablespoons shortening Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar; add milk, well-beaten eggs and melted shortening; mix well. Bake in greased pan in moderate oven about 25 minutes.
A quick-bread Sally Lunn from a baking powder company's booklet: no yeast, no rising time, and a batter stiff enough to spread rather than pour. It comes together in the time the oven takes to heat.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in books of this era means 350–375°F. At 350°F a shallow pan takes the full 25 minutes; in a deeper pan expect 30–35 and test with a skewer.
- PanNo size is given. An 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan gives a bread about an inch and a half deep, which is what the 25-minute timing assumes. A loaf tin will need considerably longer and browns unevenly.
- ShorteningHere this means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat. Melted butter is the better choice and closer to the older English versions; the quantity is small enough that the difference in tenderness is minor.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is heavy by modern standards, where one to one and a quarter teaspoons per cup is usual. Reduce to two teaspoons if you find the crumb tastes metallic or sinks in the centre.
- MixingThe recipe says "mix well," but combine only until the flour disappears. This is a batter bread, not a dough, and prolonged beating after the liquid goes in can give a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Eggs"Well-beaten" means beaten whole until frothy, not separated and whipped. The lift comes from the baking powder; the eggs are there for richness and structure.
- Yield and servingAbout eight or nine squares from an 8-inch pan. Sally Lunn is best eaten hot from the pan, split and buttered, and it stales quickly -- bake it for the meal you intend to serve it at.
Sally Lunn belongs to Bath, in the west of England, where a rich, light yeast bread of that name has been sold since at least the late eighteenth century; the origin of the name is traditional rather than documented, variously attributed to a baker of that name or derived from the French solilemme. The bread crossed to America and took root in the South, where it appears in nineteenth-century Virginia and Maryland cookbooks, generally still raised with yeast. What happened to it here is what happened to a great many yeast breads after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable: the name stayed, the method changed, and a long rise collapsed into twenty-five minutes.