1800's foods Daily Calendar Recipes History Specialty Cakes Specialty Foods admin 5 years agoDecember 10, 2021

September 4th, 1875 – 1980’s Sally Lunn Cakes & 1912 Cucumber Relish

Burlington Vermont 1875
September 4th 1875

Sally Lunn Cakes
Two and one-half cups of flour, 2 ½ teaspoons of baking powder, ½ cup sugar, ½ teaspoon of salt, 1 egg, 1 cup sugar, ½ teaspoonful melted butter. Mix in the order given, bake in gem-pans or cups. Very nice. Add a cup of berries and it makes a delicious berry cake, and bake in a shallow pan.
Lawsie.

DAILY RECIPES BY CALENDAR

The list of names for the people who contributed recipes for these books are listed here;

https://kitchenrecipetreasures.com/2021/03/04/daily-recipes-by-calendar-family-names/

Most of the time, Sally Lunn’s are a bread or a bun; but they are sometimes made into a bread or yeast cake with fruits, nuts and spices. There are all kinds of recipes for yeast dough cakes, made with some of the daily (or weekly) bread dough set aside to make a sweet treat as well as the breads made for every day consumption.
It was a common practice to use brewer’s yeast as well as the bread dough for the leavening in cakes and breads.
You would never guess from the name that it is a recipe that goes back several hundred years.
From all I can trace there is no evidence that there was a real person named Sally Lunn, although there are several theories about it. The earliest recipe was published in England in 1680 in Bath where a bakery still sells the distinctive type of bun known as a Sally Lunn, on the spot where a French refugee was said to have made and sold them.
Almost every old cook book or handwritten manuscript has at least one of them in it. Supposedly George Washington loved them so much he had them for breakfast often; known as Washington’s breakfast bread or Federal bread. There are many different types of Sally lunn, (Also Lun and Lund, Solemena and soelleme) a bread, a cake, and a bun; it is a sweet yeast bread similar to a brioche.
This is one of those mystery recipes that were so common, everyone knew what it was, and so there is no explanation necessary to say why.
They are rather simple recipes; I will post several of them as we go along, some dating back into the 1700’s.
A Sally Lunn is a large bun or teacake made with a yeast dough including cream and eggs, similar to the sweet brioche breads of France. Served warm and sliced, with butter, it was first recorded in 1780 in the spa town of Bath in southwest England. Wikipedia

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colonial-recipes-sally-lunn-cake-82438919/

“Beat four eggs well; then melt a large Tablespoonful of Butter, put it in a Teacup of warm Water, and pour it to the Eggs with a Teaspoon of Salt and a Teacup of Yeast (this means Potato Yeast); beat in a Quart of Flour making the Batter stiff enough for a Spoon to stand in. Put it to rise before the Fire the Night before. Beat it over in the Morning, grease your Cake-mould and put it in Time enough to rise before baking. Should you want it for Supper, make it up at 10:00 o’Clock in the Morning in the Winter and 12: o’Clock in the Summer.”
Here’s the circa 1770 recipe which was reprinted in the Williamsburg cookbook:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Lunn_bun

Sally Lunns

Andover Hampshire UK 1800’s

Sally Lunn

Micco Florida 1940’s through the 80’s

Sally Lunn

Ann Arbor Michigan 1899 cookbook

Baking Yeast– Also called Brewer’s yeast: The left-over yeast in the dregs of beer or wine making, called emptins. Professional bakers acquired this from the brewers and distillers to make their baked goods before the discovery of other leavenings like baking soda. If you were lucky you could capture some useful wild yeasts by leaving the flour and water solution uncovered for a day or more, then keeping it alive by feeding it, using some and feeding it again. All while trying to protect it from contamination. If you have ever heard of a “Friendship Bread or Cake” They stem from this practice of capturing wild yeasts.

The results of brewing yeasts as a leavening for baked goods varied a lot. Added ingredients to the basic recipe of grain flours, salt, yeast and water, made yeast cakes which included sugar, spices, fruits and nuts to the bread recipe. Sponges used highly beaten egg whites as leavening and pound cakes combined the flour, butter, sugar and eggs in a denser more solid cake.

Some of these recipes recommend beating ingredients for a ½ hour to well over an hour; with the invention of electric mixers, the time involved is greatly reduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast

Saleratus – From the Latin sal aerates, meaning “aerated salt”. A precursor to baking soda, it hit the market in 1840 and was a chalky powder used for the chemical leavening needed to produce carbon dioxide gas that gives the rise in your baked goods. It was made by adding carbonic acid to pearlash, changing the potassium carbonate into potassium bicarbonate.

It had replaced pearlash as the choice of leavening by 1850 but was soon replaced by baking soda in 1860; although baking soda was also called saleratus for a while; I have found recipes into the early 1900’s using the word saleratus instead of baking soda.

To substitute; per 1 teaspoon of saleratus, 1 ¼ teaspoons of baking soda.

https://www.cooksinfo.com/saleratus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate

Avondale Pennsylvania 1912

September 4th 1912

Cucumber Relish Mrs. Shirk (good)

Makes 4 pints

8 cups of thinly sliced (not pared) cucumbers

2 cups of thinly sliced onions

Salt real evenly

Let stand 1 hr. drain and add

2 cups vinegar