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Sally Lunns
3/4 lb. (3 cups) flour I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) butter I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) sugar I compressed yeast cake ½ gills (3/4 cup) milk 1½ teaspoonful salt I beaten egg Sieve the flour and salt into a basin, rub in the butter lightly. Stir the sugar and yeast together until liquid; add to them the milk, which should be just tepid. Beat up the egg and add it to the milk and yeast. Make a hollow in the middle of the flour, strain in the yeast, et cetera, mix to a soft but not sticky dough. Knead it lightly on a Cakes well floured baking board. Butter well two plain round cake tins, divide the dough into two cakes, drop one into each tin. Cover the tops with a piece of paper, put the tins in a warm place until the dough has risen and filled them. This will probably take one hour. Next put them in a hot oven and bake for thirty minutes. When cooked, turn them out of the tins. Brush the tops over with a little warmed milk and butter, and leave them on a sieve until cold.
Besides being excellent cut in slices, toasted, buttered and served hot, they are very good sliced as ordinary bread and butter.
Sally Lunn was a Bath celebrity who, at the end of the eighteenth century, kept a cake shop which was a favorite resort for both youth and age in the old West of England country town.
Sally originally carried out her cakes, morning and evening, in a basket with a white cover.
Later her small shop on Lilliput Alley became a favorite haunt, and Dalmer, a baker and musician, seeing that it was a very good thing, bought the business, composed a song about the cakes and 人 set it to music. This song became a popular street ditty, and barrows were used to distribute the now celebrated cakes.
An enriched yeast bread in the Bath manner, closer to brioche than to cake. The quantities are workable as given; the main adjustments are the yeast, the oven, and the baking time.
- The yeastA compressed yeast cake of this era was roughly 0.6 oz of fresh yeast. One packet of active dry yeast (2¼ teaspoons) or 2 teaspoons of instant yeast is the equivalent here. Creaming sugar and fresh yeast together liquefies it; with dry yeast, simply dissolve it in the tepid milk with the sugar.
- Milk quantityThe printed "1/2 gills" is a broken fraction — the parenthetical ¾ cup makes clear that 1½ gills was meant, a gill being half a cup. Three-quarters of a cup of liquid to 3 cups of flour, plus an egg and butter, gives a firm dough; add a spoonful more milk if it will not come together.
- Salt1½ teaspoons in 3 cups of flour is on the high side but within normal bread range. If you prefer a milder loaf, use 1 teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400–450F. For an egg-and-butter dough that browns quickly, bake at 400–425F and start checking at 20 minutes; the full thirty may leave the crust dark. The loaves are done at an internal temperature of about 190F.
- TinsTwo plain round cake tins of 6 to 7 inches suit this quantity. A deep round tin will give a taller loaf; a wide shallow tin will produce something flatter and drier.
- The riseOne hour in a warm place is the estimate, but go by the dough, not the clock. It should fill the tins and hold a slow-filling dent when pressed. Underproofed Sally Lunns bake up tight and bready.
- The milk-and-butter glazeBrushing warm milk and melted butter over the hot tops softens the crust as it cools. Do this immediately out of the tin, then cool on a rack (the "sieve" of the original) so the bottoms do not steam.
- Yield and servingTwo small round loaves, each cutting into six or eight slices. Best on the day they are baked; after that, split, toast and butter them, which is what the recipe recommends anyway.
Sally Lunn belongs to Bath, and to a tradition that is far better documented as a bread than as a biography. The story repeated here — the girl with the basket, the baker Dalmer who bought her out and wrote a song about the cakes — is the standard nineteenth-century telling and should be treated as traditional rather than established; no contemporary record of a woman named Sally Lunn selling cakes in Bath has ever been produced. An alternative explanation, also unproven, derives the name from the French solilemne or from soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the pale crumb under a golden top. What is certain is the bread itself: a rich, lightly sweetened yeast dough of the sort that spread through eighteenth-century English tea tables alongside the new fashion for taking tea in public rooms, and which Bath, as a resort town, was well placed to make famous.