Home › Small Cakes of All Kinds › Drop Tea Cakes
Drop Tea Cakes
6 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter 1 cup lard 1 cup currants 1 egg (beaten) Pinch of salt 3 teaspoons baking powder.
Mix all together with milk enough to make a stiff batter. Drop into buttered pans and bake in quick oven.
A big, plain currant drop cake of the rock-cake type, written for a cook who already knew what "stiff batter" felt like. The milk is left to your judgement, so add it slowly.
- Quick ovenIn period tables this usually means somewhere around 400-425F, though the term was never precise. Small drop cakes brown fast, so check at 10 minutes; 12-15 minutes is usually enough for a spoon-sized cake.
- The milk is the whole recipeNo quantity is given because the dough should be stiff enough to hold a peak on the spoon and not spread into a puddle. Start with about 1/2 cup and add a tablespoon at a time until it just holds together; how much you need will depend on the flour. Too much and you get flat, crisp biscuits instead of cakes.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods mills. Modern unbleached all-purpose is the direct substitute; do not use bread flour, which will toughen the crumb.
- LardThe cup of lard alongside the cup of butter gives tenderness and a short bite. Leaf lard or ordinary rendered lard both work; shortening is the closest modern stand-in, though you lose some flavour. All butter makes a firmer, sweeter cake that spreads more.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh blackcurrants or redcurrants. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before mixing so they suspend rather than sink.
- One egg for six cups of flourThat is deliberate and correct for the style. These are meant to be dry, crumbly and keepable, closer to a rock cake than a modern cookie, and they are barely sweet by current standards.
- Buttered pansOrdinary greased baking sheets. Parchment is easier and prevents the high-fat bottoms from over-browning at quick-oven heat.
- YieldA full batch is very large, on the order of five to six dozen small cakes. Halving it is sensible for a modern household.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a promotional volume issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with the company's flour, and it became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada in the early twentieth century. "Tea cakes" in that setting means a plain small cake to have with tea rather than anything iced or filled, and the drop method, spooning stiff dough straight onto a pan, was the fastest way to get sixty of them out of one bowl. The proportions tell you a good deal about the kitchen it came from: six cups of flour to one egg, currants as the only fruit, and equal parts butter and lard, because lard was cheap.