Sally Lunn
Sift one and one-half pounds of flour; make a hole in the middle and put in two ounces of butter warmed in a pint of milk, one saltspoonful of salt, three well beaten eggs, one-half cupful of yeast. Mix the whole well together and put it in well buttered tin pans and set in a warm place to rise, about six or seven hours. It should be broken, not cut. It is better sent whole to the table and broken in a napkin just before eating.
A rich, lightly sweet yeast bread that sits between a brioche and a plain loaf. The recipe assumes a home baker with liquid barm and a bread oven, so the two things it omits entirely are yeast strength and baking temperature.
- Flour by weightOne and a half pounds is 24 oz, roughly 5 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Weigh it if you can; the dough should be soft and just short of pourable, closer to a thick batter than a kneadable dough.
- The half cupful of yeastThis is liquid yeast — homemade barm or a brewer's leftover — not granules. Half a cup of it is mostly water, so if you substitute about 2 1/4 tsp of instant or active dry yeast, add roughly 1/3 cup of extra liquid to keep the hydration right.
- Why six or seven hoursThat rise time belongs to weak barm. The recipe gives a single rise, in the buttered pans; with modern commercial yeast in a warm kitchen expect the pans to be ready in roughly 1 to 2 hours rather than six or seven. Watch the dough, not the clock.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. For 24 oz of flour that is very little; 2 teaspoons of fine salt is closer to modern taste and will not slow the yeast meaningfully.
- Milk temperatureThe butter is melted in a pint of warmed milk. Let the mixture cool to blood heat before it meets the yeast and the beaten eggs, or you will kill the one and scramble the other.
- BakingNo oven instruction is given. Bake at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes in a tube pan or two loaf tins, until deep gold and reading about 190F at the centre. The high egg and butter content browns fast, so tent with foil if it colours early.
- Broken, not cutThis is the hinge of the whole entry. The open, slightly stringy crumb of a Sally Lunn tears cleanly and compresses under a knife, which is why it goes to the table whole in a folded napkin and is pulled apart warm.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of dough — one large tube-pan loaf or two standard loaves, serving eight to ten at tea.
Sally Lunn is associated with Bath and appears in English print by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Tradition names it for a woman who sold the buns in that city; an alternative story derives the name from the French soleil et lune, sun and moon, for the gold top and pale base. Neither account is documented, and both should be treated as folklore. The bread crossed the Atlantic and settled in the American South, particularly Virginia, where it became a standard supper and tea bread and where nineteenth-century cookbooks print it frequently. Here it is simply the enriched bread made when company was coming, and the instruction to send it whole and break it in a napkin belongs to that table custom.