Sally Lunn
1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 2 cups bread flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup Karo, Red Label 2 eggs 7/8 cup milk 1/4 cup Mazola Sift the dry ingredients and stir in the milk, eggs, Karo and Mazola. Beat until bubbly, pour into a good-sized shallow pan oiled with Mazola, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven, 350 to 375 degrees F. Cut in squares and serve warm.
A quick-bread version of Sally Lunn from a corn-products promotional booklet, so every branded ingredient is a corn product. Substitutions are straightforward once you know what they were.
- The branded ingredientsArgo and Kingsford's cornstarch is plain cornstarch; Mazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil works. Karo Red Label was the darker of the company's table syrups, closer to today's dark corn syrup than to light; light corn syrup gives a paler, milder crumb.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters cup plus two tablespoons.
- OvenThe recipe gives its own numbers, 350 to 375F.
- Pan size"A good-sized shallow pan" is all the recipe says; with this much batter something in the region of an 8- or 9-inch square is a reasonable reading.
- Beat until bubbly, then stopThis is the hinge. Bread flour is high in gluten and will toughen quickly; beat only until the batter is smooth and aerated, no longer.
- Not the yeasted Sally LunnThere is no yeast and no rising time here, so expect something between a cornbread and a plain cake rather than the tall, tender yeast bread of the same name. Serve it the day it is baked.
- YieldNine to twelve squares from an 8- or 9-inch pan, enough for four to six at breakfast.
Sally Lunn is properly a yeast-risen sweet bread, rich with eggs and butter, and its name is generally traced to Bath in the west of England in the late eighteenth century; the story of a bun-seller called Sally Lunn is traditional rather than documented, as is the tidier explanation that the name corrupts soleil et lune for the golden top and pale crumb. It travelled to America early and became a fixture of Southern breakfast and tea tables, where by the nineteenth century cooks were already raising it with baking powder or soda instead of yeast to get it on the table faster. This version goes further still: it appears in a booklet issued to promote the Corn Products Refining Company's lines, so the butter has become Mazola, the sugar has become Karo, and part of the flour has become Argo cornstarch. What survives of the original is mainly the name and the habit of cutting it in squares and eating it warm.