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Currant Tea Cakes
2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons shortening 1/2 cup currants Sift together flour, baking powder, sugar and salt; add milk, well-beaten egg and melted shortening; add currants which have been washed, dried and dusted with a little flour; mix well. The batter should be stiff. Grease hot muffin tins and fill half full. Bake about 20 minutes in hot oven.
A plain baking-powder muffin batter, sweetened and studded with dried currants. Everything here works in a modern kitchen; only the oven language and a couple of proportions need translating.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this is roughly 400-425F; the upper end suits a half-filled standard muffin cup for about twenty minutes. Test with a skewer at 18 minutes.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small seedless raisins, not fresh red or black currants from the garden. Fresh fruit would wreck the batter with juice.
- Flouring the fruitThe dusting of flour is what keeps the currants suspended rather than sitting on the bottom. Do it after washing and drying them, and shake off the excess.
- SaltA full teaspoon in two cups of flour is on the heavy side for modern palates, particularly if the shortening is salted butter. Half a teaspoon is closer to current practice.
- ShorteningUnspecified here; lard or a vegetable shortening would both fit the period, and melted butter is the usual modern substitute and gives better flavour. Add it after the milk and egg, as the recipe directs, so it does not seize on contact with cold liquid.
- "The batter should be stiff"Stiff here means thick and spoonable, not smooth. Stir only until the flour disappears -- overmixing a baking-powder batter gives tunnels and a tough crumb.
- Greasing hot tinsThe recipe has you grease the tins hot; warm tins help release and are often said to give a quicker start to the rise. Paper liners work but you lose the crisp edge.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, filled half full as directed. They are best within a few hours of baking.
This comes from the promotional recipe literature of the Royal Baking Powder Company, which for decades put free recipe booklets into American kitchens with its own product called for by name -- here three teaspoons to two cups of flour, a generous proportion. "Tea cake" in this period is a loose term for a small plain cake or sweetened biscuit served with tea rather than at a meal, and dried Zante currants were a common choice: cheap, long-keeping, and needing no preparation beyond a wash. What dates the recipe is not the fruit but the method. Chemical leavening let a cook produce something bread-like in under half an hour with no yeast, no sponge and no waiting, which is precisely the selling point these booklets were built to make.