Home › Cookery › Delicate Tea Cakes
Delicate Tea Cakes
Whites of 3 eggs beaten to a froth. 1 cupful of pulverized sugar. 1/2 cupful of sweet milk. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. 2½ cupfuls of flour. 1 teaspoonful of almonds. 1/2 cupful of melted butter.--Mrs. R.
A short list of ingredients with no method at all, which was normal for a community cookbook of the 1870s — the compiler assumed you knew what a tea cake was. Read it as a stiff rolled cookie dough rather than a batter.
- Method, since none is givenWhisk the flour with the cream of tartar and soda, beat the sugar into the melted butter, then add the milk and the stiffly beaten whites alternately with the flour. As written the dough may be too soft to roll; chilling it, or working in a little more flour, would be needed if you mean to roll and cut.
- OvenNothing is specified; no oven term is given in the recipe. As a modern equivalent, around 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colouring and the tops still pale. These are meant to stay light, not to brown.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar is finely ground granulated — closest to modern superfine or caster sugar. It is not confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will make the cakes chalky.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that many recipes in this book call for. The cream of tartar here supplies the acid that soured milk would otherwise provide.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether they are a homemade baking powder, roughly 2:1 by volume as given. They react on contact with the milk, so mix and bake without a long wait, or the lift is spent before the cakes reach the oven.
- "1 teaspoonful of almonds"Almost certainly almond flavouring, i.e. a teaspoonful of almond extract or essence; a teaspoonful of chopped nuts would do little in this quantity of dough.
- YieldNot stated in the recipe; this quantity of dough would make several dozen small cakes.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialled fragments — "Mrs. R." hands over her proportions and trusts the reader with everything else. The Southern tea cake is not a cake in the layer sense but a plain sweet biscuit, rolled and cut, closer to a sugar cookie than to anything iced; "delicate" in this period signals whiteness and lightness, achieved by using only the whites of the eggs and refusing to let the cakes brown. The leavening is the older cream-of-tartar-and-soda pairing, combined in the bowl rather than bought ready-mixed.