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Tea-Cakes
American "Flannel Cakes."
Mix, over-night, 2 qts. of milk, 3 tablespoonfuls of yeast, a teaspoonful of salt and some flour to make a batter; leave it to rise.
Next morning add 2 well-beaten eggs and a tablespoonful of butter. Fry on a girdle. "Bun Loaf" Tea-cakes. (Miss Holland.) 2 lbs. flour, 2 ozs. butter, 2 eggs, 1 pt. new milk, 1 oz. yeast, ¼ lb. sugar. After it has risen, add sultana raisins. Shape and bake. (See also "Bun Loaf" No. 1. under Cake.) Cornflour Cakes. 1 lb. Oswego cornflour, ³¼ lb. butter, ¼ lb. sifted sugar, 4 eggs, 1½ teaspoonfuls baking powder, pinch of salt, the rind of a lemon grated. Pass the Oswego through a sieve to free it of lumps, add the sugar to it, then the grated lemon and the well-beaten eggs. Beat the butter to a cream, and add by degrees the Oswego flour. When mixed, put a small teaspoonful into a buttered patty tin, and bake in a rather quick oven. They should be ready in 10 minutes. Cornish Potato Cakes. ½ lb. suet chopped fine, teacupful of flour, 4 large boiled potatoes (cold), teaspoonful baking powder, a pinch of salt, all well rubbed together and rolled out as for puff-paste, half an inch thick.
Bake in a quick oven, cut in squares, and serve hot. Cream Honey Cakes.
Take 1 lb. fine flour, pass it through a fine wire sieve, work in ¼ lb. good butter till smooth. Mix in 3 ozs. castor sugar and a good pinch of salt, 2 yolks of eggs, 1½ ozs. Borwick's baking powder, ½ pt. cold milk, roll lightly, and cut into fancy shapes; brush them over with sweetened milk, bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes. Serve very hot with honey poured over. They may be served plain if preferred. Lancashire Girdle Cake. ¼ lb. flour (keep a little back), 1 oz. butter, a pinch of salt; rub together as if making pastry. Work up into dough with warm milk, adding the rest of the flour gradually, roll out thin (¼ to ½ inch). Put a plate over, and cut it round. Bake on a greased girdle, turning once to brown both sides. Cut across in four pieces. Split and butter inside quickly. Serve in a warm napkin, putting dish over a basin full of hot water. When buttering it is well to warm the butter a little to make it spread quickly, or cake gets chilled.
Maudesley's Irish Brown Tea-cake. (Mrs. Hozier and Mrs. Buchanan. 1879.) 1 qt. of coarse wheatmeal, less than a ¼ lb. butter. Rub the butter completely into the flour with the hand, add a little salt, and mix together with sufficient milk to make a dough. Work it a little, and roll out once only, to the size and thickness required. It should be fully an inch thick. Bake in the oven from 20 to 30 minutes. Then split it like a muffin, and butter the inside well. Return to oven for a few minutes to melt the butter. Serve hot.
This is good for breakfast.
Sally Lunn. (Mrs. Benstead.) 2 lbs. of fine flour, 4 mashed potatoes, 1 teacupful of luke-warm new milk, a piece
A page of seven tea-cake formulas of varying reliability, several of them written down as aides-memoire rather than instructions. Two contain quantities that will not work as printed, and one entry is cut off mid-sentence.
- The girdleA girdle is a griddle or bakestone — a flat iron plate over direct heat, not a pan with sides. A heavy cast-iron skillet or flat griddle at moderate heat (roughly 350-375F surface) does the same job. Grease it lightly and wipe it out between batches; the Lancashire cake wants a steady, unhurried heat so the inside sets before the outside colours.
- Oven temperaturesA "rather quick" oven for the cornflour cakes is around 425-450F, and ten minutes for a teaspoonful of batter in a patty tin is about right. "Moderate" for the cream honey cakes is about 350F. The Cornish potato cakes do call for a quick oven, so 425F; the Irish brown cake specifies no oven heat at all, only a time of 20-30 minutes, so any figure for it is a guess.
- Yeast quantitiesThe 1 oz of yeast in the bun loaf is most likely fresh compressed yeast: substitute about 1/2 oz (roughly 4 tsp) active dry or a scant 3 tsp instant. The 3 tablespoonfuls in the flannel cakes, being measured by volume, is presumably barm or a liquid brewer's yeast, and cannot be converted honestly — treat that batter as a sponge and let it rise until bubbly and sour-smelling rather than by any clock.
- Oswego cornflourOswego was a widely sold American brand of cornstarch, so "cornflour" here means cornstarch, not the maize flour sold under that name in some countries today. Sieving it is not optional; it lumps badly and there is no wheat gluten to hide the lumps.
- The baking powder in the honey cakes1 1/2 oz of baking powder to 1 lb of flour is roughly three times a workable dose and will taste soapy and metallic. Borwick's was a well-known period brand and there is no reason to think it weaker than modern powder, though its formulation is not recorded here. Use about 4 teaspoons for the pound of flour.
- The honey cake liquid1 1/2 pints of milk to 1 lb of flour gives a pourable batter, not something you can roll and cut into fancy shapes. Half a pint is the amount that produces the scone-like dough the method describes; add it gradually and stop when the dough just comes together.
- The Cornish potato cakes1 1/2 lb of suet to one teacupful of flour and four potatoes is out of proportion by any reading — the mixture would be mostly fat. Somewhere between 4 and 6 oz of suet is the plausible figure for that quantity of potato and flour. Rub it in cold and handle the dough as little as possible.
- Lancashire cake thicknessThe printed page gives the thickness as ¼ to ½ inch, as our text now reads. Roll it nearer a quarter inch, cut it round using an inverted plate, and give it a few minutes a side, turning once.
- Coarse wheatmealFor the Irish brown cake, use stoneground wholemeal — a quart measured by volume works out somewhere around 1 lb to 1 1/4 lb, depending on the coarseness of the meal and on whether the quart is imperial. There is no raising agent at all in this one, which is why it is rolled once and left thick: it bakes to a dense, close-grained cake meant to be split and soaked with butter.
- The Sally LunnThe entry breaks off mid-line at "a piece" — presumably "a piece of butter" and a quantity of yeast. It cannot be made from what survives here; use a complete Sally Lunn recipe.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie collected recipes across some forty years from friends, cooks and houses she visited, and her book — published in 1909, after her death, from her papers — keeps the attributions intact: Miss Holland, Mrs Hozier and Mrs Buchanan in 1879, Mrs Benstead. That is why this page reads as a file rather than a chapter, with an American griddle batter sitting next to a Lancashire girdle cake and an Irish wholemeal round. The girdle itself is the thread through several of these: in Scotland and the north of England the flat iron plate hung over the fire long outlasted the domestic oven, and tea-cakes baked on it were split, buttered hot and carried to the table wrapped in a napkin over a basin of hot water, exactly as described here. "Sally Lunn" is generally traced to Bath in the eighteenth century, though the origin of the name is disputed and every confident explanation of it should be treated as folklore. Oswego cornflour and Borwick's baking powder appear by name in the entries, branded goods of the Victorian grocery trade.