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Tea Cakes
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking-powder
4 tablespoons shortening
⅔ cup milk
Mix and sift the flour, baking-powder and salt, and chop in the shortening. Add sufficient milk to make a soft dough, about two-thirds cup. Toss on floured board and roll into a sheet onehalf inch in thickness. Reverse a pie-plate upon the rolled dough, and with a sharp knife, cut a cake the exact size of the pie-plate. With a cake-turner transfer the cake to a greased baking-tin and bake in a quick oven (400°-425° F.). While hot, split, butter and cut like a pie. Another may be made of the trimmings.
This is baking-powder biscuit dough baked as one large round rather than cut into individual biscuits — essentially the shortcake base that appears elsewhere in books of this era. It comes together in about ten minutes and is meant to be eaten hot.
- OvenThe book gives the number, which is unusual and welcome: 400–425°F. Bake on the upper-middle rack, 15–20 minutes, until the top is evenly golden and the round sounds hollow when tapped.
- ShorteningAt the time this meant lard or a butter-and-lard mix; modern vegetable shortening will work, and butter gives better flavour. Four tablespoons is a half-stick — a lean ratio, so the crumb is closer to biscuit than to pastry.
- "Chop in"Cut the fat into the dry ingredients with two knives or a pastry blender until it is in pieces the size of small peas. Keep it cold and do not rub it smooth; the visible flakes are what make the round split cleanly.
- The milk is a range, not a ruleTwo-thirds cup is the author's estimate, and the instruction "sufficient milk to make a soft dough" governs. Add it in two additions; the dough should be shaggy and just barely hold together, wetter than you would expect.
- Handle it once"Toss on floured board" means a few quick folds, no more. Overworked dough bakes tough and refuses to split, which defeats the whole point of the recipe.
- Cutting to sizeThe book does not give the plate's size; a 9-inch pie plate gives a round of about the right proportion at half an inch thick. Cutting a clean edge rather than shaping by hand keeps the round from spreading unevenly, and the recipe itself says the trimmings make a second cake.
- SplittingWhile still hot, pry the round apart with a fork rather than sawing it with a knife — the two halves separate along the flake lines. Butter both cut faces immediately, then cut into wedges.
- Yield and servingOne 9-inch round serves six to eight as a tea bread. Dough of this type also served as a shortcake base for sweetened crushed berries and cream, though this recipe does not say so; for that use, add two tablespoons of sugar to the dry ingredients.
- Eat it the same hourThere is no egg and little fat, so it stales fast. These rounds are a same-day proposition; leftovers are best split, buttered and reheated in a hot oven.
The "tea cake" here is not a sweet bun but a plain quick bread of the American baking-powder school — the same two-cups-flour, four-teaspoons-powder formula that ran through Fannie Farmer and the domestic-science cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, baked as a single round to be split, buttered and cut in wedges at the table. Chemical leavening, cheap and reliable after the baking-powder trade consolidated in the later nineteenth century, made bread possible on short notice, and household manuals leaned on it heavily for afternoon tea and unexpected callers. Butterick published this collection as part of the same enterprise that sold dress patterns and The Delineator, presumably with an eye to a housekeeper working without staff. The trick of inverting a pie plate to cut the dough is worth noticing, whether or not it was widespread: it assumes the reader owns a pie plate and no round cutter, and it gets a professional-looking cake out of a kitchen with almost no equipment.