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Bread

Sally Lunn

A yeasted bread made with milk, eggs, flour, and lard or butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sally Lunn

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the lard or butter in the milk.

  2. Remove from heat and add the beaten eggs, flour, and yeast.

  3. Let the mixture stand for about 3 hours or until light.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into flat pans without kneading and let it stand for 1 hour before baking.

  2. Bake until golden, then split and butter the bread.

  3. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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, binding the batter and helping it set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the risen bread together as it bakes.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the batter rise and the crumb light.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and its sugars help the crust brown.
Lard or butter
Adds fat, tenderness and flavor to the crumb.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until light. Yeast needs time to ferment and trap gas in the batter. Stopping early leaves a dense loaf, while the rise is what makes this bread light.

“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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