Beat ¼ pound of butter with ¼ pound of sugar to a cream. Add 1 egg and 1 teaspoonful each of cinnamon and mace. Mix with 6 ounces of sifted flour, a pinch of salt and milk enough to make a stiff dough; then roll out very thin. Cut into round cakes and bake in a quick oven until done.
August 14 — No. 14
English
A thin, crisp spiced butter biscuit of the kind sold by the tin in Edwardian England. The whole recipe hinges on rolling it genuinely thin and watching the oven, since there is no leavening and very little liquid to buy you time.
- Weights, converted¼ pound butter is 115 g, one US stick. ¼ pound sugar is about 113 g, roughly ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon of granulated. Six ounces of flour is 170 g, roughly 1⅓ cups scooped lightly — weigh it if you can, because the dough is meant to be stiff and an extra ounce will make it dry.
- "A quick oven"Usually taken to mean somewhere around 400–425°F. At thin-rolled size these should bake in the region of 6 to 9 minutes; pull them when the edges have just coloured, since the residual heat finishes them and the sugar catches quickly at that heat.
- Roll it very thinThe instruction is doing real work. Rolled to about ⅛ inch these snap; rolled thick they are heavy and pale in the middle, as there is no baking powder or soda anywhere in the recipe. Chill the dough half an hour first and roll between sheets of paper.
- Milk, unmeasuredThe quantity is left to judgement, and reasonably so — it depends on your flour and egg size. Start with a tablespoon and add by teaspoons only until the crumbs come together into a firm, non-sticky dough.
- A teaspoon of mace is a lotGround mace was used far more freely in older baking than it is now. A full teaspoon alongside a teaspoon of cinnamon gives a strongly perfumed, almost medicinal cake; half of each is closer to modern taste, though the original is not a mistake.
- Cutting"Round cakes" implies a plain cutter; no size is specified, and something around 2 to 2½ inches is a reasonable choice. Keep the thickness uniform or the thinner ones will scorch before the thicker ones set.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on cutter size and thickness; expect several dozen small cakes. They crisp as they cool and keep for a week or two in a tin; they soften fast in a humid kitchen, so do not store them with anything moist.
Tea cakes in this sense are biscuits, not the yeasted currant buns that go by the same name in the north of England — a source of confusion that predates this book and outlives it. The type here, creamed butter and sugar with egg, a stiff flour dough and a heavy hand with cinnamon and mace, belongs to the long line of English spiced shortcakes that grew cheaper and more everyday as refined sugar and imported spices became less of a luxury through the nineteenth century.