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Tea Cakes
One quart of flour; two teaspoons baking powder; one teaspoon salt; one tablespoon of butter and the same of lard. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt, and chop in the shortening. Add sufficient milk to make a soft dough, about three cups. Toss on floured board and roll into sheets half an inch in thickness. Reverse a pie plate upon the rolled dough, and, with a sharp knife, cut cakes the exact size. With a cake turner transfer these cakes to a greased baking-tin and bake in a quick oven. While hot, split, butter, and cut like a pie.
This is a large round baking-powder biscuit, baked as a single sheet the size of a pie plate and cut in wedges at the table. Two details in the original need attention before you start.
- A quart of flourFlour was sold and measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g of all-purpose flour. The rest of the proportions follow from that.
- The three cups of milkThree cups of milk to four cups of flour gives batter, not a dough you can roll half an inch thick. Take the instruction "sufficient milk to make a soft dough" as the real measure and expect somewhere between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 cups. The printed figure is either a misprint or a measure for a much larger batch.
- Leavening is lightTwo teaspoons of baking powder for four cups of flour is about half what a modern biscuit recipe uses. Period baking powders were single-acting, releasing their gas on contact with the liquid rather than in the oven; with today's double-acting powder, 1 teaspoon per cup of flour gives the lift most cooks now expect.
- Shortening is leaner than you thinkOne tablespoon each of butter and lard for a pound of flour makes a dry, bready cake rather than a flaky biscuit. The recipe's instruction to split and butter it while hot goes some way to making up the difference.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. A thick round wants high heat to set the crust and rise fast. Figure 15 to 20 minutes for a half-inch sheet, until the top is browned and the center springs back.
- Chop in the shorteningTwo knives, a pastry blender or your fingertips, working quickly so the fat stays in flakes. Handle the dough as little as possible after the milk goes in — toss, pat or roll once, cut, and get it into the oven.
- Cutting to the plateInverting a pie plate and cutting around it simply gives a clean round; a 9-inch cake plate or a cardboard template does the same. Reroll the scraps into a second round rather than discarding them.
- YieldExpect two 9-inch rounds, each cut into six or eight wedges — enough for a table of six to eight at tea.
The Butterick company published cookbooks alongside its dress patterns, aimed at the same middle-class household that bought a magazine subscription and a paper pattern in the same order, and the emphasis throughout is on economy and speed. "Tea cakes" in American usage of this period could mean several things — in the South, very commonly a small sweet biscuit or cookie — but here it means a plain quick bread served hot at the light evening or afternoon meal, split and buttered like a scone. The technique — chemical leavening, a soft dough, a hot oven, minimal handling — is the same one that produced Southern biscuits and Northern baking-powder biscuits, and the difference is mostly one of shape. Baking soda and, from the later nineteenth century, commercial baking powder made breads like this possible without yeast or a long rise, which is precisely why they multiply in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s: a cook could put fresh bread on the table within half an hour of deciding to.