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Tea-Cakes, Baker's, to Toast
Cut the tea-cake across into three or four slices, according to thickness. Toast and butter these on both sides, and lay them one upon another in a hot dish. Cut them into quarters, and serve as hot as possible. They will retain their heat much longer if kept in a covered plate over a basin of boiling water.
A method rather than a formula: the point is splitting the cake into more than the usual two halves so that every layer carries butter. A few things need translating.
- What a tea-cake is hereA British baker's tea-cake is a soft, lightly sweetened yeast bun, usually about 4 in. across and often studded with currants — not an American layer cake or cookie. A supermarket packet of currant tea-cakes is the direct descendant; a plain soft bun or a English muffin behaves the same way.
- Three or four slices, not twoThe instruction to cut a tea-cake into three or four horizontal slices assumes a bun taller than the flat, split-and-toast versions sold today. Judge by thickness: aim for slices no more than about half an inch, or the middle layers will not toast through before the outsides scorch.
- Toasting both sidesThis was written for a toasting fork at an open fire or the bars of a range, where you turn the bread by hand. Under a modern broiler, set the rack close and watch continuously — cut surfaces of a sweet, currant-flecked bun brown in well under a minute and the fruit burns first.
- Butter while hotThe butter has to go on the instant each slice comes off the heat so it soaks in rather than sitting on top. Have it soft and ready before you start toasting; this is the difference between the dish and ordinary buttered toast.
- The stackingLayering the buttered slices back into a tower in a hot dish, then cutting the whole stack into quarters, keeps the heat in: the layers insulate each other and the butter from the upper slices runs down. Warm the serving dish first, or the bottom slice goes cold and greasy.
- The covered plate over boiling waterAn improvised bain-marie for holding the stack — a plate over a basin of just-boiled water, covered. It works, but only for a few minutes; steam eventually softens the toasted surfaces. A very low oven is drier if you need to hold longer.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One tea-cake, quartered, will serve one person, or two at a crowded table. Scale by the number of guests rather than trying to toast several at once — they must reach the table hot.
Toasted tea-cakes belong to the nineteenth-century British tea table, when the late-afternoon meal had settled into a fixed institution and bakers supplied a whole family of soft yeast buns intended to be split, toasted at the fire and buttered. The entry is not about baking at all but about the handling of a bought article — a reminder that many Victorian households bought their bread and buns from a baker and reserved the kitchen fire for finishing them. The insistence on serving "as hot as possible," and the trick of the covered plate over boiling water, suggest the practical problem of a dining room some distance from the range. Northern England, and Yorkshire in particular, is still associated with the currant tea-cake, though the claim is traditional rather than documented in early cookbooks, which describe the buns without much interest in where they came from.