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Tea Cakes (Quarts of flour small teacup)
2 quarts of flour. 1 small teacup of lard. 1 small teacup of butter. 3 cupfuls of sugar. 3 eggs. 1 cupful of cream (sour is best). 2 small teaspoonfuls of soda. 1 grated nutmeg.
Roll out half an inch thick, and bake in a moderate oven.--Mrs. F. C. W.
A plain rolled sugar cookie scaled for a large Virginia household. The whole thing hinges on the acid in the cream reacting with the soda, so the choice of dairy matters more than anything else here.
- Sour cream is the leaveningThe two teaspoons of soda have little to react with unless the cream is genuinely acidic, and the recipe recommends sour cream without insisting on it. Cultured sour cream or well-shaken buttermilk both work; with sweet cream expect a flat cake and possibly a soapy note. Modern sour cream is generally thick, so thin it with a spoonful of milk to pouring consistency if needed.
- Quarts of flourFlour was sold and measured by volume. Two quarts is 8 cups, about 2 lb, which makes this an unusually large batch by current standards. Halving it is sensible for a first attempt.
- The teacupPeriod teacup measures varied; somewhere in the 1/2 to 3/4 cup range is a reasonable reading, and a "small" one smaller still. Read the lard and butter as about 1/2 cup each and the sugar "cupfuls" as roughly standard 8-ounce cups; the dough should be stiff enough to roll, so hold back a little cream if it slackens.
- LardLeaf lard gives the short, tender crumb intended. Modern shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves more like shortening; all butter works but the cakes will be crisper and spread more.
- Moderate oven350F. At a full half-inch thick these need 12 to 15 minutes and should be pulled while the centers are still pale, with only the edges taking color.
- A whole nutmegOne grated nutmeg is 2 to 3 teaspoons, which is assertive by current taste and was the entire flavoring of the cake. Start with half if you are unsure, and grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its point.
- Thickness and yieldHalf an inch is deliberate: these are soft, cakey rounds, not thin snapping cookies. Cut with a 2 1/2-inch cutter and the full batch gives several dozen -- five or six dozen by rough estimate.
- StorageWith this much sugar and fat they keep about a week in a tin. They firm up as they sit.
"Tea cake" in the Southern sense means a rolled sugar cookie served with tea or coffee, not the yeasted English bun of the same name, and recipes for it fill the baking chapters of post-Civil War Southern household books. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers. The sour-cream-and-soda pairing here belongs to a moment when commercial baking powder was available but had not displaced older methods; cooks often relied instead on the acid they already had on hand from milk left to clabber, and measured flour by the quart.