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Blueberry Tea Cake
3 tablespoons Cottolene. ½ cup sugar. 1 egg. 2⅔ cups bread flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt. 1 cup milk. 3/4 cup berries.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Add egg beaten thick and light. Mix and sift flour (except three tablespoons), baking powder and salt; add to first mixture alternately with milk. Sprinkle remaining flour over berries and fold them in quickly. Bake in well greased shallow pan thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve hot with Hard Sauce or cream, or with butter.
A plain quick-bread batter baked in a shallow pan and eaten warm, in the manner of a cobbler more than a modern coffee cake. Two figures in the ingredient list have been mangled by the typesetter or the scanner and need judgment before you begin.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, solid at room temperature, made by the company that published this book. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening, or butter if you want the flavour; 3 tablespoons is a very lean amount of fat for this much flour, which is why the cake is meant to be eaten hot.
- The sugar figure"1½ cup sugar" against 2⅔ cups flour and only 3 tablespoons of fat is out of proportion for a tea cake of this era and will give a coarse, wet crumb. The printed figure is most likely a broken ½. Treat it as ambiguous and scale to your own judgment rather than trusting the number.
- 22/3 cupsRead as 2⅔ cups; the fraction bar has dropped out.
- Bread flourPeriod bread flour may have been closer to today's all-purpose than to modern high-protein bread flour. All-purpose gives a more tender result here.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350–375°F. Thirty minutes suits a shallow pan roughly 8x8 or 9x9 inches; a deeper pan will need 40 to 45 minutes and a tester in the centre.
- Baking powder4 teaspoons to 2⅔ cups flour is heavy by modern standards. Two and a half to three teaspoons of a current double-acting powder does the same work without the metallic aftertaste.
- Flouring the berriesThe reserved 3 tablespoons of flour keeps the fruit suspended and stops the juice bleeding grey streaks through the crumb. Fold in quickly, as instructed.
- Berries in DecemberBerries -- Frozen berries work; add them still frozen and tossed in the reserved flour.
- Yield and servingAbout nine squares. Hard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, and it is meant to melt into the cake at the table.
52 Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in the 1910s by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene — which explains why a cottonseed-oil shortening appears in place of butter or lard in nearly every recipe in the book. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton industry that found a second life in Northern kitchens once refining improved, and manufacturers pushed it hard through free or cheap cookbooks organised, as this one is, around a full year of menus. Blueberry tea cake belongs to the large American family of shallow-baked fruit quick breads — buckle, cobbler, crumb cake — that rose with chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its placement in December is a reminder that a home cook of the period expected to reach for a jar of put-up fruit rather than fresh.}</invoke></function_calls>