I hope you enjoy this issue of Between the Layers! Share it with your friends. Sally Lunn & Happy 250th Birthday, Jane Austen - No. 371It’s bread, it’s cake, it’s something to bake as you rewatch Pride & Prejudice + latkes and Hanukkah
IF YOU HAVEN’T YET HEARD, at this moment, Janeites are strolling the streets of Bath, England. Chaperoned, I hope! Janeites are period-costumed devotees of British writer Jane Austen, who would have turned 250 years of age today. When Miss Austen was born on the snowy evening of Dec. 16, 1775, in the small English village of Steventon, she was her parents’ seventh child and second daughter. Much was happening in the world at the time. The American Revolutionary War had begun eight months earlier with a battle between British soldiers and American revolutionaries at Concord and Lexington in Massachusetts. The famous author of six finished published novels—Sense and Sensibility (written anonymously), her opus Pride and Prejudice (written when she was 20), Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey—also wrote other novels and thousands of letters. (If you watched the PBS series Miss Austen, you might have learned many letters were burned after her death by her sister Cassandra.) Jane Austen had a reasonable following during her short lifetime but didn’t become a global sensation until the early 20th Century as younger, mostly female, readers related to her timeless themes such as the dangers and pleasures of falling in love, the need to get along with neighbors, behavior of parents toward their children, and how we differentiate between those who mean us well and those who don’t. She died at 41, from either lupus, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, or Addison’s disease in 1817. Scholars are still unsure of the cause of her death.
At this very moment at the Jane Austen Centre, Janeites from all over are convening as Elizabeth Bennetts and Mr. Darcys. They’re listening to readings, writing with a quill as Miss Austen would have done, sipping mulled wine, and tasting birthday cake. There’s a strong connection between Jane Austen and Bath. At 23, she first visited in the spring of 1799, and stayed with her mother in two rooms on the second floor of 13 Queen Square in the historic city known for and named after its Roman-built baths. Bath had become a spa town popular with fashionable Regency society. According to Robert Morrison, the author of The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World, Bath was featured throughout Miss Austen’s novels. She found Bath pleasant and exciting at first, but after moving there with her family in 1801, she grew dissatisfied with its wealthy society. Her family moved away in 1806.
The memories surfaced in her novels such as when George Wickham from Pride and Prejudice, who carries on a flirtation with Elizabeth Bennet but runs off with and then marries Elizabeth’s youngest sister Lydia, exposes his true character and enjoys himself in Bath and London. In Persuasion, Miss Austen’s final completed love story, the second half takes place in Bath. It was the first of her novels to feature a woman, who compared to the standards of the time, was past the first bloom of youth.
To my knowledge, the festive yeast bread Sally Lunn isn’t mentioned in one Jane Austen novel, but there’s just too much of an overlap for me to not write about it on Miss Austen’s birthday.Sally Lunn was baked in Bath and other parts of England, and it would travel with the Quakers to the middle colonies of America where still today it is found on the pages of early Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina cookbooks. The story goes that a Huguenot refugee named Solange Luyon (later anglicised to Sally Lunn) brought the recipe to Bath from France, baked the buns in one of Bath’s oldest houses, and sold them from a basket while she walked the cobbled streets. In researching my book Baking in the American South, I learned that Sally Lunn bread was reserved for special occasions. Firstly, it was made of wheat flour, which was precious and not everyone could afford. It required yeast to rise, so that meant time for someone in the kitchen to watch the bread. It needed eggs, milk, and butter to make it rich and cake-like. So it was what you made when guests came calling, and because they had to travel quite a way to visit, they stayed overnight.
Down in the Low Country of South Carolina, correspondence received by Emily Wharton Sinkler between 1840 and 1850 revealed the timeless brillance of Sally Lunn. It “will cause your friends to rejoice,” says the sender of the letter, and once you place the dough in the pan, “Sally should again rise up before being shoved into the oven, to be brought out and presented to your friends as the beauty and belle of the evening.” If Miss Austen had been alive to read that letter, Sally might have appeared in her novel.
About three years ago I was having dinner with friends at a Nashville restaurant called The Optimist. It was wickedly hot, and the summer menu was peppered with seasonal offerings like heirloom tomato salad, crab soup, and fried squash blossoms. We were reveling in the food and the restaurant’s air conditioning. But short-staffed, the kitchen was backed up with orders, and food was coming out slowly. We had wolfed down the large yeasty rolls brought to the table and were just about ready to beg for another round when the server explained the chaotic kitchen situation and asked if there was anything she could do to make the evening better. I said, “I’d love the recipe for your rolls.” She replied, “Let me see what I can do about that,” and turned toward the kitchen. A few minutes later she came back with the recipe ripped from the pastry kitchen wall. She told me to take a photo of it quickly with my phone, which I did, so she could get the recipe back where it belonged before anyone asked.
The very next day, I was in my kitchen with a calculator, scale, and a sack of King Arthur AP flour. The “stolen” recipe yielded nearly a thousand rolls. Ok, not a thousand, but close to a thousand. I took it down by a quarter, then I took it down again by another quarter. The house smelled like heaven and I was calling friends to come by and grab warm rolls from my counter. Once I got the recipe whittled down to something a home cook could manage, I reached out to the restaurant’s pastry chef Chrysta Poulos and asked permission to use the recipe in my next book and wondered about its story. It seems the owner, Ford Fry, had been raised on Sally Lunn bread in his mother’s Houston, Texas, kitchen. For his seafood restaurant concept, he wanted a warm, squishy yeast roll that reminded him of that nostalgic bread. The Optimist rolls are glazed with honey and sprinkled with flaked sea salt after baking, Poulos’ modern twist. An enriched bread like Sally Lunn or brioche means butter and eggs or both are added to the dough to improve everything—its crumb, slice, texture, and its keeping qualities. These kinds of breads were never hard-scrabble. They reveal affluence and access. They are, as Emily Wharton Sinkler, described, for when people come over.
It might seem a stretch the week before Christmas to tackle a new bread, but if you do, you won’t be sorry. You don’t have to make rolls, just plop the risen dough into a greased Bundt or tube pan, let rise again, and bake. Slice for dinner, supper, brunch, or a holiday breakfast. It goes with everything—casseroles, ham, turkey, and yes, good marmalade. Which is how I think Jane Austen might have enjoyed Sally Lunn. How could she weather winters writing about love and loss without a cup of tea and bread? I see Mrs. Bennett putting out a sliced loaf for her daughters who were chatting, squabbling, and looking out the window for the handsome Charles Bingley. I’ll bet Mr. Bennett grabbed a slice before he retreated to his quiet study. Surely Sally Lunn had to have been there, so since I can’t get to Bath, I’m baking Sally and rewatching Pride & Prejudice for the umpteenth time. Happy Birthday, Jane! - xo, Anne Are you celebrating Jane Austen’s birthday? What’s your favorite Jane Austen novel?
Potato-Onion LatkesI can’t let Hanukkah pass without expressing my sorrow for the senseless murders that took place in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday, and those at Brown University in Providence, RI, the day before. When I was testing recipes for my Skillet Love book nearly a decade ago, I consulted with legendary Jewish cookbook author Joan Nathan about the best way to make latkes—the fried pancakes of grated potatoes, traditional at Hanukkah. Joan told me to grate the potatoes along with the onions to keep the potatoes from darkening. I share the recipe with you this Hanukkah week because if ever there was a week for needing light and love from latkes, it’s now:
THE RECIPE: Sally LunnYou can control the texture of Sally Lunn with the number of eggs you add. A Sally Lunn made with two large eggs is yeasty and doughy, and more roll-like. But when made with three eggs and a little more flour (nearly 4 cups) to pull the dough together, it is more cake-like. Suit yourself. Also, if you use bread flour it will bake into a taller loaf, which you may prefer if you’re placing it on a platter or sharing with a friend. Makes 12 servings Prep: 20 to 25 minutes Rise: 2 1/4 hours Bake: 28 to 32 minutes
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