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Bread

Sally Lunns

Sally Lunn's is a yeast bread roll made with milk, yeast, butter, caster sugar, and flour, 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 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 Lunns

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Combine 1¼ cups warm milk and the yeast with enough sifted, warmed flour to create a batter consistency.

  2. Cover and let the mixture stand for about 2 hours to rise.

  3. Mix the caster sugar into the milk, then add it to the batter along with the butter, rubbed into a little flour, and knead into dough.

  4. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes, then shape into cakes and place on baking tins.

Bake and serve

  1. Brush the tops lightly with warm milk and let them rise in a warm place.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 minutes.

  3. Split open, butter, and serve very 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 + 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Yeast
Ferments the batter so the dough rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the bread a tender crumb and flavour.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the risen dough together as it bakes.
Milk
Provides moisture and helps the dough brown on the tops when baked.

The step that matters

Letting the batter rise. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas that raises the dough. Under-proofed dough bakes dense, while over-proofed dough can collapse and lose structure.

“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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