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English Tea Cake
1 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda 1 cup Sugar 1 cup seeded Raisins, 1/2 teaspoonful each of Cloves, or Allspice and Cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoonful Nutmeg. "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1/2 cup Butter, (melted). 2 cups Flour, 1 cup sour Milk, 1 teaspoonful The Great Mix the sugar and spices together; add the butter and rub together until creamy and light; dissolve one teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda in three tablespoonfuls of water; put soda in milk and add to the mixed ingredients; stir in the flour, and last the raisins mixed with flour. You may have to add a half cup of flour if batter is too soft. An excellent cake that does not require eggs.
A plain eggless spice loaf from a baking-soda promotional pamphlet. The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and one quantity is missing outright, so read the method first.
- The missing sugarThe method begins "Mix the sugar and spices together," but no sugar appears in the ingredient list. Comparable eggless sour-milk spice cakes of the period commonly take around a cup, which is a sensible reading, but the original is genuinely silent on the amount.
- The garbled list"1 teaspoonful The Great" and "The Great 'Arm & Hammer' Soda" are two halves of the same line, broken by the pamphlet's typesetting. The recipe calls for one teaspoon of baking soda, nothing more.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or 1 cup milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Why no baking powderThe soda is the only leavening, and it works against the acid in the soured milk. Dissolving it in three tablespoons of water before it meets the milk was common advice of the period, the aim being to spread the soda evenly so no undissolved pocket survives to leave a bitter, discoloured spot.
- SpicesRead as 1/2 teaspoon cloves or allspice, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. Spice long kept in bulk may have been weaker than what you will buy now; the full amount is still reasonable, but it will read as assertively spiced.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the raisins in flour before folding them in keeps them suspended rather than sunk. Take that flour from the two cups rather than adding extra.
- Batter consistencyThe extra half cup of flour may well be needed, since modern cultured buttermilk tends to be thinner than clabbered milk. Aim for a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon, not one that pours.
- Pan and ovenNo temperature or time is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. As a modern starting point, bake in a greased loaf pan or 8-inch square tin at 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Makes one loaf.
- Work quicklyOnce the soda meets the acid the rise begins immediately and does not wait. Have the pan greased and the oven at temperature before you combine anything.
"English tea cake" in American recipe books of this period rarely means anything as specific as the name suggests; it signals a plain, lightly spiced, fruited loaf meant to be sliced and buttered alongside tea, as distinct from a frosted layer cake. The interesting phrase is the last one: "An excellent cake that does not require eggs." Eggless cakes were a standing category in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century baking, useful when eggs were seasonal and expensive, and they depended entirely on the reaction between an acid, usually soured milk, and an alkali. That is exactly why the recipe exists here. A cake that rises without a single egg is the most persuasive demonstration of what soda can do. The instruction to dissolve the soda in water first addresses the commonest complaint about soda baking: bitter yellow spots where the powder never dispersed.