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Sally Lunn

A yeast-based bun made with milk, butter, eggs, sugar, flour, and salt, baked after two rises.

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

Prepare the batter

  1. Warm the milk with the butter or lard.

  2. Beat the eggs until very light, then mix in the sugar, yeast, and enough flour to create a batter stiffer than pound cake.

  3. Add a little salt and set the mixture to rise in a cool place at 10:30 AM in cold weather, or later in warm weather.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter a pan an hour and a half before serving tea and pour the batter into it.

  2. Let it rise a second time and bake for one hour.

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. Egg + flourtop 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

Eggs
Add structure and richness, and when beaten they trap air that lightens the crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas during the rise, leavening the batter so the bun becomes light and airy.
Butter or lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer, softer crumb.
Milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and helps form the batter.
Flour
Forms the gluten network and set structure that holds the risen batter's shape.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness with some browning in the baked crust.

The step that matters

Letting the batter rise twice. Yeast needs time and suitable warmth to produce gas; rising too briefly leaves a dense bun, while over-rising can collapse the structure. Timing depends on the room temperature, as the record notes for cold and warm weather.

“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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