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Sally Lunn
½ cup shortening
2 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons baking-powder
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 cr in muffin-pans, in a moderate oven (350°-400° 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 quick bread than to the yeasted original. The proportions are sound; only the vagueness about pan, time and salt needs filling in.
- Oven temperatureThe stated 350–400°F is a wide band. Use 350°F for a loaf, which needs the longer, gentler bake, and 400°F for muffins, which want a quick rise.
- ShorteningIn American cookbooks of this era 'shortening' usually meant lard or a vegetable fat, though butter was often admitted under the same heading. Butter works and tastes better, but it browns faster and the crumb will be slightly less tender; keep it soft, not melted, for creaming.
- No salt listedThe recipe omits it. Add 1/2 teaspoon with the flour or the bread tastes flat.
- Order of mixingThe egg goes in last here, after the flour and milk, which is unusual and risks overworking the batter. Beating the egg into the creamed sugar and shortening first, then alternating flour and milk, gives a better crumb with no other change.
- Pan and timingThe batter fills a standard 8½ x 4½-inch loaf pan or about 12 muffin cups. A loaf runs 40–50 minutes at 350°F; muffins 18–20 minutes at 400°F. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- HuckleberriesFresh huckleberries are hard to buy outside the Northwest and parts of Appalachia; blueberries substitute directly. Toss the cup of berries in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in so they do not sink.
- YieldOne loaf, roughly ten slices, or a dozen muffins. Best the day it is baked — quick breads of this type stale quickly.
Sally Lunn is an English bread, generally traced to Bath in the eighteenth century, where it was a large, light, yeast-raised round enriched with cream and eggs and served warm in slices with butter. The name is often said to come from a baker of that name, though no such person has been documented, and the derivation from the French soleil et lune is equally traditional and equally unproven. What appears here is the American descendant: by the time Butterick issued this collection, chemical leavening had reworked the dish into something a cook could mix and bake within the hour. The huckleberry note is a distinctly American addition.