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Tea Cakes (Tablespoon melted fat cup)
1 tablespoon melted fat 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 1 cup milk 3 teaspoons baking-powder 2 cups flour 1 cup chopped nuts Cream the fat with the sugar, add the beaten egg, then add the milk alternately with the sifted ingredients. Lastly add the floured nuts. Bake in greased muffin-pans at 400-425 degrees for twenty minutes. Split each cake, butter it, and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon or with grated maple sugar and chopped nuts. Serve hot with afternoon tea.
A plain muffin batter dressed up for the tea table: baked in muffin tins, then split, buttered and sugared while hot. The finishing is the point, so time the baking to the moment you want to serve.
- Melted fatIn this period "fat" in a sweet batter means butter, lard, or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Melted butter is the best modern choice; note that it is creamed with the sugar rather than beaten in cold, which gives a denser, muffin-like crumb rather than a light cake.
- Oven400-425F is given outright in the text. Use 400F in a modern oven with an accurate thermometer; twenty minutes will be about right for standard muffin cups, less for small ones.
- No salt listedThere is no salt in the ingredients, a common omission in recipes of this kind. Add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon with the flour and baking powder or the cakes will taste flat.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, which runs closer to two. It is not harmful, but sift it thoroughly with the flour and expect a pronounced rise and a slightly open crumb.
- Floured nutsTossing the chopped nuts in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended instead of sinking. Do this before you begin mixing, and add them with a few strokes only.
- Mix minimallyAdding milk alternately with the dry ingredients is a cake technique, but this is effectively a muffin batter. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; further beating develops gluten and produces tunnels and a tough cake.
- Grated maple sugarThis refers to hard cake maple sugar, grated on a box grater; it was kept in maple-producing districts. Granulated maple sugar sold today can be used as is; the recipe gives no quantity for the topping, so judge by eye.
- Yield and servingRoughly twelve standard muffins. They must be split and buttered hot, as the recipe says; cold, they are ordinary nut muffins.
Tea cakes in American cookbooks of this era were rarely cakes in the layer-and-frosting sense. They were small, quickly mixed breads baked in muffin or gem pans and served hot with butter, the sweet counterpart to the biscuit, and belonged to the practice of afternoon tea. Chemical leavening made such things possible on short notice: a hostess could have something warm on the table within half an hour of deciding to entertain. Cake maple sugar was sold in hard blocks and grated for use.