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Bread

Sally Lunn

A sweet yeast bread made with milk, butter, flour, sugar, salt, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sally Lunn

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Boil the milk and let it cool until lukewarm.

  2. Dissolve the yeast in ½ cup of tepid water and add it to the milk.

  3. Stir in the melted butter, flour, sugar, and salt.

  4. Beat the mixture well and let it stand for 2 hours.

Add the eggs and rest

  1. Separate the eggs, beat the whites, then the yolks, and add them to the mixture.

  2. Let it stand for an additional 15 minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the bread its structure and crumb.
Eggs
Add structure, richness, and a lighter, more tender crumb as they set in the oven.
Yeast cake
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become airy.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness and helps the dough hold its shape.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and gives a richer flavour.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and some browning in the crust.

The step that matters

Let the milk cool until lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the milk must be only lukewarm before the yeast goes in. Too cool and the rise will be slow, so the dough would not lighten properly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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