Heritage Sally Lunn Recipe

I just love heritage cooking, which is why I was so excited to find this "very old" recipe in a cookbook I spotted at the little Sandy Spring Museum. Sandy Spring, Maryland was an early Quaker settlement.  Though it was a short and simple recipe, I did have to figure some things out first.

I rarely bake anything requiring yeast, so I had to figure out how to convert a yeast cake to the powdered yeast I found at the supermarket (thank goodness for the Internet - I found out 1/2 cake is just about 1 packet of yeast).  Then I had to figure out what Martin's Milk was.  I figure it was just regular milk, but wanted to be sure.  I found a lot of artifacts from MANY different dairy and milk companies with Martin as a family name (who knew?), so I concluded the recipe was calling for regular milk.  Then I had to figure out what a "moderate oven" was.  I would have defaulted to 350 degrees, which would have been a good move since apparently, many people have also used the search terms "what does bake in a moderate oven mean", again, hurrah for the Internet.

In the end, the bread was...decent.  Far from the best bread I've had but it came out of my moderate oven, and even mediocre bread is quite amazing hot and fresh-baked from home.