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Tea Cakes (Mrs H P Stowell One egg one)
Mrs. H. P. Stowell One egg, one cup sugar, one cup sweet milk, piece of butter size of an egg, one teaspoon cream tartar, onehalf teaspoon soda, one pint of flour. Eaten warm.
A contributor's shorthand, written for a cook who already knew what to do with a batter: no method, no pan, no oven note. The proportions are those of a plain cup cake, and they work out cleanly.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Cream it with the sugar before the egg goes in.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 ounces of soft wheat flour. Modern all-purpose flour is stronger; measure by spooning and levelling rather than scooping to avoid a tough crumb.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes in the same books call for. Whole milk gives the best result here.
- Cream tartar and sodaTogether they are a homemade baking powder: 1 teaspoon cream of tartar with 1/2 teaspoon soda works out to somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Sift both through the flour so the soda cannot streak, and get the batter into the oven promptly, since this leavening acts as soon as it is wet.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe names neither. The batter should be a pour-and-drop consistency, suited to gem or muffin pans, or an 8-inch square tin. A moderate oven, around 375F, is a reasonable modern setting: figure roughly 15 to 18 minutes for small cakes and 25 to 30 for a single tin, and judge by the cakes rather than the clock.
- YieldRoughly a dozen small cakes, or one shallow 8-inch cake cut in squares.
- Eaten warmNot a flourish but the point of the recipe. With one egg and no fat beyond 2 ounces of butter, these stale quickly and are dry by the next day.
Nineteenth-century American "tea cakes" were not a single dish but a category: any small, plain, quickly made cake fit to set out with tea, somewhere between a muffin and a cookie depending on who was writing. This one belongs to the cream-of-tartar-and-soda generation, when cooks bought the two chemicals separately and combined them in the bowl; reliable commercial baking powders were generally available by the 1870s. The Home Cook Book was assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why the entry reads as it does. Mrs. Stowell set down proportions without explaining how to cream butter or judge a moderate oven, and the resulting terseness is characteristic of the whole genre of subscription cookbooks.