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Tea Cake
One quart flour, one cup sour milk, one tea-spoon soda, one-half pound lard, one-half pound chopped raisins or currants; roll two inches thick and bake in a quick oven; split open, butter, and eat while hot.-Mrs. Canby, Bellefontaine.
A plain, unsweetened sour-milk biscuit dough, baked thick and split like a scone. The recipe assumes you know a great deal that it does not say, so a few translations are needed before you start.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in 1877: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of all-purpose. Scoop and level rather than packing, or the dough will run dry.
- Half a pound of lardThat is 1 cup, and it is a very rich dough by modern biscuit standards. Work it in cold, in pieces, until the mixture looks like coarse meal; the fat is what makes the split-and-butter texture worth the trouble.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk. Use cultured buttermilk, which has the acidity the teaspoon of soda needs. Ordinary milk soured with a spoonful of vinegar works, but pasteurized milk left on the counter does not sour, it spoils.
- No salt, no sugarThe original omits both. Add about a teaspoon of salt with the flour; the only sweetness comes from the fruit, and a tablespoon or two of sugar would not be out of character.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Soda-raised dough needs the heat immediately or the gas escapes before the crumb sets. If the tops color too fast for the depth of the cake, drop the heat after the first ten minutes.
- Two inches thickNot a typo, and it is the hinge of the recipe. Pat the dough out two inches deep and cut into large rounds or squares, so there is enough interior to split and butter. At that depth expect 25 to 35 minutes; test with a skewer at the center rather than trusting the crust.
- Raisins or currantsCurrants means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Half a pound is a generous fruiting for this quantity of dough; chop the raisins as directed so they distribute instead of tearing the crumb.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten large cakes. They are meant to be split and buttered hot from the oven, and like all soda breads they are noticeably worse the next day; reheat rather than eat cold.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) came out of Marysville, Ohio, and its recipes are credited to named contributors from towns across the state, Mrs. Canby of Bellefontaine among them. "Tea cake" in this section does not mean a sweet cake but simply something baked quickly for the tea table, the lighter evening meal that stood opposite breakfast in a nineteenth-century household. Everything about the formula marks the moment: sour milk and soda rather than yeast, lard rather than butter as the working fat, and dried fruit as the only sweetening. Recipes of this kind were written down for cooks who already knew the method and needed only the proportions, which is why the instructions run to a single line and leave out the salt.</p>