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Lucy's Tea Cake
Mrs. H. Baird.
Two eggs, one cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, one teacup of milk, two cups of flour, and a few currants.
A contributor's shorthand: a list of proportions with no method, no pan and no oven, on the assumption that any cook reading it had made a plain cake a hundred times. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The missing leaveningAs written there is no raising agent, and two eggs will not lift two cups of flour into anything but a dense slab. Whether it was omitted in error or assumed by the contributor cannot be known from the page; if you want a risen cake, add about 2 teaspoons of baking powder sifted with the flour.
- Teacup vs. cupThe recipe uses both "cup" and "teacup" in the same breath. Some sources reckon a teacup at about 3/4 of a modern 8-oz cup, though the two words were often used interchangeably in books of this kind, so the milk may be anywhere from 3/4 cup to a full one. Start with less and add only if the batter is stiffer than a thick drop batter.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not the fresh redcurrants of a garden. A few means a handful, perhaps 1/3 cup; toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Method, since none is givenCream the half cup of butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add flour and milk alternately and fold in the fruit last. Overbeating after the flour goes in is the one thing that will spoil it.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction whatever. A plain tea cake of this size wants a moderate oven, about 350F; nothing here needs a hot oven.
- Pan and yieldThe quantities suit a single 8-inch round or square tin, or a small loaf pan, baked 30 to 40 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. It cuts into eight or nine plain squares.
- What "tea cake" means hereMost likely not a yeasted bun in the English sense but a plain butter cake to be sliced for afternoon tea. At one cup of sugar to two cups of flour it is a frankly sweet one.
The Home Cook Book belongs to a distinctly nineteenth-century genre: the compiled charity cookbook, in which local women each sent in a favourite receipt, often over their own names, with the proceeds going to a charitable cause. That format explains much about this page. "Lucy's Tea Cake" is credited to Mrs. H. Baird, and the recipe is not written for a stranger but set down as one experienced cook would tell another, ingredients only, method assumed. Plain butter cakes like this one were a staple of the tea table, cheap enough to make often and dressed up with whatever dried fruit was in the pantry. Naming a cake for a woman, Lucy here, rather than for its ingredients is a familiar feature of these community volumes, where a recipe travelled with the reputation of the person who made it well.