Quick Sally Lunn Tea Bread (1859)

From The Young Housekeeper’s Friend (Revised and Enlarged), 1859

The Story Behind This Recipe

A minister’s daughter with advice to give

In 1810 a girl from Goshen, Connecticut, named Mary Ann Hooker was a student at the Litchfield Female Academy. She was born on April 17, 1796, to the Rev. Asahel Hooker and Phoebe Edwards Hooker, so a life among ministers came naturally. In 1818 she married one, Elias Cornelius, who had trained at Yale. The next year he became associate pastor of the Tabernacle Church in Salem, Massachusetts. The couple had six children. In 1831 Elias was named secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, but he fell ill and died in February 1832.

Mary was already a writer by then. Her religious tracts included one on how a Christian mother should guide her young children. In 1849 she turned to the household with The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, and the book kept going. A revised and enlarged edition was still being printed ten years later, and our recipe comes from that 1859 version. She died in Newton, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1880.

A bun from Bath, a legend from nowhere

In 1780 a Bath guidebook described visitors to the spa finishing their glass of mineral water and then eating "Sally Lunns or hot spungy rolls." The name had already appeared in an Irish poem of 1776, but nobody knows for sure where it came from. In England a Sally Lunn was a large bun or teacake made from a yeast dough rich with cream and eggs, a near relative of French brioche. One theory hears the French soleil et lune, sun and moon, in the name, for the golden top and pale inside. A tea room in Bath tells of a Huguenot refugee called Solange Luyon, but no record of her turns up before the 20th century.

The French had their own version. The Parisian chef Carême published a warm brioche called the solilem in 1815, and in 1845 Eliza Acton gave English cooks a "Solimemne," which she described as a rich French breakfast cake or Sally Lunn. Dickens put Sally Lunns beside muffins and crumpets in The Chimes (1844). British colonists had already carried the recipe across the Atlantic, where Americans kept reworking it.

Soda, cream of tartar and a few minutes’ stirring

Mrs. Cornelius kept the familiar base of flour, butter, eggs, milk and a little sugar, and dropped the yeast. Her cook scatters cream of tartar into the flour, adds the eggs unbeaten, dissolves saleratus in the second cup of milk, and stirs "steadily a few minutes." Three plate-sized pans bake in fifteen or twenty minutes. One bread historian dates baking powder breads in America to the 1830s, but ready-made powder was still new, so this cook measures out her own soda and acid.

Speed was only part of the appeal. Many Americans believed sour foods upset the stomach, and soda breads were recommended for "dyspeptics." A Sally Lunn like this one could also be ready for an afternoon or holiday tea at short notice. An 1892 newspaper even said the Sally Lunn had been called "Washington’s breakfast bread." Cornelius’s last line shows how close it sat to dessert: add spice, double the sugar, and "you have a good plain cake for the cake-basket."