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Sally Lunn Tea Cakes
2 1/2 pounds of roll dough. 4 ounces of butter, melted. 3 ounces of sugar. 2 whole eggs and 2 yolks Half cupful of milk. 8 ounces of flour. Take the dough from the rolls at 2 o'clock, and work in the enr ching ingredients-the milk warm, and sugar and butter melted in it and eggs beaten light-then add the flour and beat thoroughly.
It makes dough too soft to handle, and like fritters. Rise 3 hours. Beat again. Divide in four pie pans. Rise half an hour. Bake about 15 minutes. They brown very easily; are not so good when allowed to become too light; should be brushed over with good butter when done. Cut in pieces like pie, but carefully, with up and down strokes of a sharp knife, as it spoils the cakes to crush them with a heavy cut. Should be baked at intervals as the meal goes on, and not sweated in the pans. The next, and last in this division, are presented as something of a specialty in breakfast breads. They have been very frequently complimented (always remembering that nothing can quite supplant fine French split rolls) and once I hoard this: "We have penetrated behind the scenes to see if we can discover what particular trick it is that makes these muffins so delicate, so fine and elastic and like a sponge. We have boarded in the G--House at Louisville, the B--House at Cincinnati, the B--House at Indianapolis," (these remarks were made several years ago) "but never met with any to equal these." "We use here the finest flour, perhaps that's the reason." "No, it isn't. So they do there, and have the best of pastrycooks, too." "Perhaps you come to breakfast here at seasonable hours when the muffins are fresh baked and hot." "No, it is in the muffins themselves and the way you make them." Perhaps they had been used to regard hotel muffins as dry, little, unpalateable things that would grease the fingers to touch. The receipt for the sort which they esteemed so much better is here given, but that is not all As was remarked about milk bread, butter rusks, sweet rusks and waffles the thorough beating properly performed with a cutting-under motion, so as to inclose air in the batter, is quite essential to insure fine quality.
This is an enrichment method rather than a from-scratch dough: it assumes a batch of plain roll dough already rising in the hotel bakeshop, which is then loosened with butter, sugar, eggs and milk into something closer to a thick batter.
- Start with roll dough2 1/2 pounds is about 1.1 kg of ordinary lean yeast roll dough. Any straight white bread or dinner-roll dough works; the recipe takes the dough from the roll batch at 2 o'clock, and with three hours' rise plus a half-hour proof the cakes are baked the same day.
- Weights in cups4 ounces butter is one stick; 3 ounces sugar is a scant half cup; 8 ounces flour is about 1 3/4 cups. The half cupful of milk should be warm, not hot, with the sugar and butter melted into it so the fat disperses instead of streaking.
- Resist adding flour"Too soft to handle, and like fritters" is the target, not a fault. The batter should drop from the spoon in ribbons. Extra flour to make it kneadable gives a bready, dry cake and loses the sponge-like crumb the whole receipt is aiming at.
- The beating is the hingeThe author's "cutting-under motion" describes the technique: lift and fold the batter over on itself with a broad spoon or spatula to trap air, rather than stirring it flat. With a stand mixer, use the paddle on medium for two or three minutes after each rise.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hotel oven for a fifteen-minute cake in a shallow pan would be moderately hot, roughly 375-400F. Watch closely from ten minutes; the recipe warns that they brown very easily, though it also says they are not so good when allowed to become too light.
- "Not sweated in the pans"Turn them out of the pie pans the moment they come from the oven, or the trapped steam softens the base into something damp. Brush the tops with butter while hot and serve at once.
- CuttingCut in wedges with a sharp knife pressed straight down and lifted, not drawn through. A sawing stroke compresses the open, elastic crumb, which is exactly the quality being sold here.
- YieldFour pie pans, best modern equivalent 8- or 9-inch rounds, cut in six or eight wedges each. Halve everything for household baking; the quantities divide cleanly (one whole egg and one yolk).
Sally Lunn came to American kitchens from England, where it is associated with Bath and is generally traced either to a legendary eighteenth-century baker of that name or, in the more linguistic version of the story, to the French solilemme — a derivation often repeated but never firmly documented. On both sides of the Atlantic it means the same thing: a yeast-raised cake enriched with butter, eggs and sugar to the point where it behaves like batter, occupying the ground between bread and cake. American cookbooks are often said to bake it in a tall mould or turban pan; the shallow pie pans and wedge-cutting here look like a professional adaptation, and the surrounding anecdote about the G—— House at Louisville and the B—— House at Cincinnati places the recipe squarely in the world of the late nineteenth-century hotel breakfast, where a pastrycook's reputation could rest on whether the morning muffins arrived light or leaden.