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Tea Cakes (Quarts of flour cupfuls)
2 quarts of flour. 3 cupfuls of sugar. 1 cup of butter. 5 eggs. 1 teaspoonful of soda dissolved in 2 tablespoonfuls of sweet milk. 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar. Season with lemon or nutmeg.--Mrs. H.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the sort every Virginia household kept in a tin. The proportions are given by the quart and the cupful, and the quantity is enormous by modern standards.
- What 2 quarts of flour meansFlour was measured by volume, and 2 quarts is 8 cups, roughly 2 lb of soft Southern flour. Scaling the whole recipe to a quarter (2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter, 1 egg, a pinch of soda and 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar) gives a manageable batch.
- YieldAs written this makes something on the order of eight to ten dozen cookies cut at 2 1/2 inches. Tea cakes of this sort were often baked in quantity and kept in a crock or tin.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is the standard homemade baking powder ratio; together they are equivalent to about four teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. If you substitute baking powder, omit both and the milk becomes optional.
- Add saltThe recipe assumes salted farm butter and specifies none. With unsalted butter, add about a teaspoon of salt to the full batch, or 1/4 teaspoon to a quarter batch.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 375-400F, 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured and the centres still pale. They firm as they cool and go hard if left in until browned through.
- The dough is meant to be rolledHandling the dough -- The recipe gives no method, but with this much flour to one cup of butter the dough is stiff enough to roll rather than drop. Chill it, roll about 1/4 inch thick, and cut with a floured tumbler or cutter. If it will not come together, work in milk a spoonful at a time.
- Seasoning"Season with lemon" means grated rind, or a teaspoon or two of extract for the full batch. Nutmeg should be grated fresh; a whole nutmeg goes a long way over 8 cups of flour, so start with a teaspoon.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, is full of these short attributed formulas -- "Mrs. H." would have been known to the book's first readers and is anonymous to us. Tea cakes in the Southern sense are not iced fancies but a plain, faintly sweet rolled cookie, kept on hand for callers and children and flavoured with whatever was in the house, usually lemon peel or nutmeg. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe to the transitional period when cooks mixed their own leavening from two jars rather than buying prepared baking powder, which was commercially available by the 1870s but not yet universal in country kitchens. The scale -- 2 quarts of flour at a time -- reflects a household baking for a large family and expecting the tin to be raided.