Talking Southern – Tea Cakes

At first glance, this seems like a topic for ladies only, but it truly is not.  Tea cakes were a staple of cookie jars around Brooks in your compiler’s youth, but seem to have ‘gone with the wind’ in recent years.    Your compiler never hears of them anymore except when he makes them himself approximately twice per year, from a time-tested recipe he got nearly twenty years ago from his late great-aunt – who lived from 1918 until 2010 and who was perhaps the best tea cake baker in Middle Georgia history.

Tea cakes are best with no other sweets; their taste is subtle and easily overpowered by more assertive flavors.  Still, there are very few things this side of Heaven better than a good tea cake – in fact,  your compiler would venture to say that if the Lord ever provided anything better to eat than one of Ruth Crawford’s tea cakes, He kept it for Himself!  But anything so good needs to be shared, so your compiler presents below his aunt’s time-tested recipe, along with a tea cake story from Brooks days nearly 140 years ago.

Ruth Crawford’s Tea Cakes

Ingredients:  1 egg; 1 cup of sugar; 1 stick of butter or margarine, softened; 2 cups self-rising flour; up to 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and a nice pinch of mace. (Stores no longer seem to carry mace in their spice sections, so your compiler buys it online.)

Instructions:  Mix ingredients together in a large bowl, kneading with your hands. Mixture will resemble small crumbs.  Gather a palm-full and squeeze together, kneading between your hands.  Place on a lightly floured surface and flatten as well as you can  with your hands.  Roll gently with a floured rolling pin, to a thickness of no more than ¼-inch.  You can cut no more than two tea cakes at a time and usually just one at a time; entire bowl should make approximately two dozen tea cakes. (Your compiler uses a rather small juice glass as a cutter, and keeps about half a cup of sifted flour in reserve, to keep things from sticking.)

Preheat oven to 350F, and bake teacakes on a lightly greased cookie sheet until edges begin to brown slightly.  There may or may not be light browning atop the tea cakes.  Do not overcook.  Remove from oven and transfer immediately to a cool pan or wire rack.  Enjoy this subtle but rich taste from Middle Georgia – one whose full essence you will not begin to realize until after the first mouthful or two.  A good tea cake is to a simple sugar cookie as a Cadillac is to a Yugo.

Now for the story:  your compiler’s great-grandmother, Mattie Henderson Crawford (1882-1972), lived her entire life in Brooks.  One day when she was a girl, her mother, a great visitor of the sick and shut-in in what was then called “Brooks Station,” carried little Mattie with her to go calling on a poverty-stricken old lady in town, taking along some garden provisions as good neighbors did then and still do.   Mattie was instructed not to ask for anything to eat at the old lady’s house.

Mattie, a very naughty little girl, asked anyway, and the old woman gave her a cold, day-old biscuit.  Mustering the maximum disdain a five-year-old Southern belle-in-training could arouse, young Mattie took one look at the stale disc, walked to the front door, and threw it out to the yard dogs.  She turned on her high-button shoe and said, “Shah!  If  I’d been at home, I’d have had a tea cake!”

It is certain young Mattie was spanked rather vigorously for this display of petulance, but she was right about one thing: not much in this world can adequately take the place of a tea cake.  And knowing this story happened in about 1887 means that the tea cake recipe above, which comes from Mattie’s youngest daughter-in-law quite likely by way of Mattie herself, has a long history behind it.

Enjoy, but don’t eat with any other sweet, especially chocolate, or you’ll miss the point entirely and will have wasted your time.