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Sally Lunn
Sift into a pan a pound and a half of flour, put in two ounces of butter warmed in a pint of new milk, one salt-spoon salt, three eggs well beaten, and two table-spoons of good yeast. Mix well together, and put the whole into a tin pan well greased, and set to rise all night. Bake a little brown in a quick oven. Warm the milk and butter over water until the butter is melted; beat the eggs in a two-quart tin-pail, and if the milk is not hot pour it over them. Stir in half the flour, then add the yeast, stirring thoroughly with the rest of the flour. Let rise over night. Some add two tablespoons sugar and use a tea-spoon soda and two of cream tartar instead of the yeast. - Rhoda, Ballsville, Va.
A yeasted breakfast bread rather than a cake, mixed as a soft batter-dough and left overnight. The two paragraphs are the same recipe told twice, the second a working method for the first.
- The hinge: milk temperatureThe second paragraph is careful about this: the eggs get the milk only "if the milk is not hot." Follow that. Melt the butter in the milk, then let it cool to about 105F before it meets the eggs or the yeast; hotter than that and the eggs curdle and the yeast dies.
- Flour by weightA pound and a half of flour is about 24 oz, roughly 5 1/2 cups of modern all-purpose. Weigh it if you can, since the dough should be a thick, sticky batter that is beaten rather than kneaded.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is very little salt for this much flour; a full teaspoon is more to modern taste.
- "Two table-spoons of good yeast"This means liquid barm or homemade potato yeast, not a dry product. Substitute one packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the cow and unskimmed. Whole milk is the equivalent.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. "Bake a little brown" means a pale gold crust, roughly 25 to 35 minutes in a tube or ring pan, less in a loaf; the centre should read about 200F.
- The overnight riseSet to rise all night assumes an unheated kitchen. In a 70F room the dough will be well past its peak by morning; use a cool room, or the refrigerator, and let it come back to temperature and finish rising in the pan before baking.
- The soda and cream of tartar variantA teaspoon of soda with two of cream of tartar is essentially homemade baking powder, about 3 teaspoons' worth, and the variant adds two tablespoons of sugar besides. Chemically leavened, it would presumably be mixed and baked without the overnight rest, giving a plainer, more scone-like crumb.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe asks only for a well-greased tin pan; a tube pan is the shape usually associated with Southern Sally Lunn and helps the deep batter cook through, but a 9 x 5 loaf pan or two 8-inch round cake pans also work. Should serve eight to ten, split and buttered while hot.
Sally Lunn is an English bread, associated since the eighteenth century with Bath, where a rich yeasted tea bread of that name was sold; the origin of the name is disputed, with the popular story of a Huguenot baker named Solange Luyon and the derivation from soleil et lune both traditional rather than documented. It travelled to America early and settled hardest in Virginia and the upper South, where it became a standing item at breakfast and tea, baked in a tube pan and served hot in wedges. The Dixie Cook-Book prints it in the manner of its era, as a contributed receipt over a name and a town, and the second half of the entry is the sort of practical amplification an editor added when the original was too terse to follow. The alternative with soda and cream of tartar marks the moment chemical leavening was displacing barm in home kitchens: the same bread, minus the overnight wait.