A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [167]
Brennan’s opens on Royal Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter and becomes famous for its lavish breakfast. Its signature dish: Bananas Foster.
At its tiny Plymouth plant, the Florida Foods Corporation packs 2,500 cases of fresh orange juice in ice, loads them onto freight cars, and ships them to Washington, D.C., to be served at the Hot Shoppe restaurants. And that is the start of Minute Maid.
Truett Cathy names his new ten-stool, South Atlanta café the “Dwarf Grill,” never dreaming that it would become the South’s popular Chick-fil-A restaurant chain.
W. T. Young Foods of Lexington, Kentucky, introduces Big Top Peanut Butter. The stemmed, pressed glass goblets in which it was packed are now collector’s items.
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1. Place ½ cup of the warm water in a spouted 1-quart measure and mix in 1 tablespoon of the sugar and all of the yeast. Let stand in a warm spot for about 5 minutes or until frothy.
2. Meanwhile, combine 2 cups of the flour, the milk powder, salt, and remaining sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add the shortening and using a pastry blender, cut into the dry ingredients until the texture of coarse meal. Mix in the remaining flour.
3. Add the yeast mixture and 1¾ cups of the remaining warm water and mix well, adding more of the water as needed to make a soft but workable dough.
4. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 5 minutes or until smooth and elastic. Shape the dough into a ball, place in a large buttered bowl, then turn the dough in the bowl so the buttered side is up.
5. Cover the dough with a clean, dry cloth and let rise in a warm, draft-free spot for about 1 hour or until doubled in bulk. Punch the dough down, cover, and again let rise until doubled in bulk—about 1 hour.
6. Punch the dough down once more, knead briefly on a lightly floured surface until satiny, then divide into three pieces of equal size. Quickly grease three 8 × 4 × 3-inch loaf pans, shape each piece of dough into a loaf, and place in the pans. Cover with a clean, dry cloth and let the loaves rise in a warm, draft-free spot for about 1 hour or until doubled in bulk. Toward the end of rising, preheat the oven to 350° F.
7. Bake the loaves on the middle oven shelf for 35 to 40 minutes or until richly browned and hollow sounding when thumped.
8. Remove the loaves from the oven. Let stand in the upright pans on wire racks for 5 minutes, then invert and turn right side up. Cool to room temperature before cutting.
If you burn your bread, it means your husband’s angry.
—OLD SMOKIES SUPERSTITION
SALLY LUNN
MAKES A 10-INCH TUBE LOAF
This lightest and loveliest of yeast breads, much prized in the Colonial South, is said to date back to the Jamestown Colony, specifically to 1619 when a shipload of “Virginia maides” arrived from England to keep house for the men who had settled there twelve years earlier. In Food in England (1954), Dorothy Hartley writes that the bread’s name comes from the cry made by a buxom lass hawking buns on the streets of Bath. “Yelled in good west-country French,” that cry was “Solet Lune! Soleilune! [sun and moon].” “An appropriate name,” Hartley reasons, “for a round bun, flat gold on top, and flat white below.” She adds that the buns were “an infernal trouble to make, taking from sunrise to sunset to ‘raise’.” Their tops were gilded with beaten egg yolks, and, Hartley continues, they were “split hot and embosomed in clouds of cream.” I will never forget my first bite of a quite different Sally Lunn at the King’s Arms in Colonial Williamsburg. I remember a waiter trundling a cart over to our table and cutting a fat wedge from a loaf that looked for all the world like angel food cake except that it was yellow. Even though I was no more than ten, I couldn’t wait to find a recipe for Sally Lunn. This one is adapted from a recipe found in the Jamestown Foundation files.
One ¼-ounce package active dry yeast
¼ cup