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Dessert

Sally-lunn

A sweet yeast cake made with eggs, butter, sugar, milk, yeast, and flour, baked into a jelly-cake style roll.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 batter

  1. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the butter, sugar, warm milk, and wet yeast.

  2. Gradually add flour until you achieve a stiff batter.

  3. Let the batter rise until light, then stir in 2 tablespoons of additional flour.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into jelly cake pans and let it rise again.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

  3. Once baked, butter each cake and stack them on top of each other like a jelly-cake.

  4. 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. Butter + milktop 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, helping the batter hold its rise.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the bun and helps it brown during baking.
Wet yeast
Produces gas that makes the batter rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch structure that sets the crumb.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise until light. Yeast needs time to produce gas and expand the batter. Rising too little leaves a dense cake, while the second rise in the pans gives the final lift before baking.

“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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