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Light Tea Cakes
Mrs. John Thomas.
One and one-half cups sugar, two-thirds cup butter, three eggs, three tablespoons sour milk, in which dissolve one-half teaspoon soda, flour; mix as soft as possible and roll white sugar on top before cutting into rings.
A rolled sugar cookie in the nineteenth-century idiom: no flour quantity, no oven temperature, no baking time. The proportions are sound, and the instruction that matters is the one about softness.
- Flour is left to judgmentThe original simply says "flour," meaning enough to make a dough that will roll. Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups, added a half cup at a time; stop as soon as the dough holds together and stops sticking badly.
- "As soft as possible" is the hingeThese cakes are tender because the dough is barely stiff enough to handle. Chill it an hour instead of working in more flour, and roll on a lightly floured board about 1/4 inch thick.
- Sour milkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, acidic enough to react with soda. Use cultured buttermilk, or milk with a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left five minutes. Modern pasteurized milk gone off is spoiled, not soured, and should not be used.
- SodaHalf a teaspoon of soda against three tablespoons of sour milk is more than the milk can neutralize; the excess likely accounts for the faint tan color and slight alkaline tang. If that flavor bothers you, reduce the soda to a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Rolling sugar on topScatter granulated sugar over the rolled sheet and pass the pin over it once so the sugar beds into the surface, then cut. Sugar bedded in this way adheres better than sugar sprinkled over cut shapes.
- "Rings"A ring cutter, or a round cutter with a smaller one used to take out the center. The shape is decorative rather than functional; plain rounds will do.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. In a modern oven, 375F for 8 to 10 minutes suits them. They are done when the edges are just colored and the tops still look pale; they firm as they cool.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen two-inch rings, depending on how much of the sheet the ring cutter wastes. Re-rolled scraps toughen, so roll them once and accept a slightly denser second batch.
"Tea cakes" in a nineteenth-century American cookbook means a small rolled and cut cookie meant to be handed round with tea, not a cake in the modern sense; the word cake covered anything sweet and baked, and "light" distinguished these from heavier fruited and spiced doughs. The recipe belongs to the soda-and-sour-milk generation of American baking, after saleratus and its successors had displaced yeast and beaten eggs as the usual lift but before commercial baking powder was universal in home kitchens, which is why the leavening depends on a household by-product every family with a milk cow had to hand. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by named women, and the attribution to Mrs. John Thomas is typical: these were working recipes, which is why the flour is unmeasured and the oven unmentioned. The contributor assumed a reader who already knew what a rollable dough felt like and how her own stove behaved.