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Dessert

Sally Lunn Cake

A yeasted cake with butter, eggs, sugar, and baking soda, baked until risen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Cake

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.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix the salt with the flour.

  2. Dissolve the yeast in 3 tablespoons of warm water and gradually add the warm milk.

  3. Beat the yolks of the eggs. Beat the whites of the eggs. Combine the yolks, whites, and sugar.

  4. Stir the mixture into the batter. Beat the mixture until smooth; it should be a soft dough that can be stirred.

  5. Set the dough to rise overnight.

Finish and bake

  1. Cream the butter.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in a little warm water and mix it with the dough.

  3. Butter your baking pans.

  4. Fill the pans two inches deep with dough.

  5. Let the dough rise until doubled in size.

  6. Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

  7. Serve the cake broken, not cut with a knife.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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).

Flour and butter 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
Provides the structure that holds the risen crumb together.
Eggs
Add structure, richness and moisture, and help the cake rise and set.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, lifting the dough before baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form a soft dough.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts to give extra lift and help the cake rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until doubled in size. Yeast needs time to ferment and trap gas. If the dough is underproved it stays dense, and if it is overproved the structure can collapse in the oven.

“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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