"Jack Campin - bogus address" > wrote in message
...
>> I am specifically trying to figure out the origin of the Southern (as in
>> American South) cookies called "tea cakes." They are likely the "little
>> cakes" that early bakers created by dropping small amounts of cake
>> batter in the pan to test the temperature of their ovens.
>>
>> I found a recipe for tea cakes in The Practice of Cookery by Mrs
>> Dalgairns, first published in 1829 in Scotland. The recipe is
>> essentially the same as my grandmother's recipe. So, I am working on
>> the assumption that they are probably goodies out of 18th century
>> Scotland, a time when their was a great deal of immigration of Scots to
>> the South.
>
> Recipe books were written for relatively wealthy people who would
> have had ovens in their houses. Most of the population of Scotland
> didn't, as late as 1829, and I doubt if any higher a proportion of
> Southern American colonists did.
>
> If your "tea cakes" (the word can mean several different things here)
> could be made on a griddle, then they could well have come from the
> poorer or more rural parts of Scotland. If they needed an oven then
> they would presumably have been confined to slaveholders (who could
> well have bought cookbooks like Mrs Dalgairns's) and spread more
> widely as ovens became more widely available.
>
Not many of our ancestors here in the South, especially the ScotsIrish sort
from whom I'm descended on most of one side, Campbells and Clarks, would
have had much in the way of ovens (other than the warming holes built into
the sides of large fireplaces), nor would they have had much in the way of
breastplates or bucklers (but maybe an occasional gorget ripped from the
neck of a fallen pink-cheeked British cornet as we looted/retrieved personal
property from the dead and soon to be so on random sites of minor
engagements), so our "tea cakes" would have likely been of the "griddle"
sort of among the middle class (while the wee and puir subsisted on hoe
cakes, cooked on the blade of the hoe).....

A couple of sidenotes....My Clark ancestors (as in General Elijah,
Revoltionary hero - one of the figures from whom Mel Gibson's composite was
formed in that ghastly cinepic, "The Patriot", founder of Clark County (and
Athens and UJawja, I guess or so claims the memorial plinth outside the
gates of the place), dreadful despoiler and dispossessor of Native 'Merkins,
etc., acquired some wealth post-Revolution and would have likely hada
kitchen with a bricj fireplace with oven(s) built into the sides. Some of
the Campbells (of the non-Tory sort) would have been likely to have acquired
assets to afford such cultured frippery, likely taking over the lands and
chattels, human and livestock, of their relatives/fellow clansmen, the Tory
Campbells fled for their lives to Novia Scotia, etc., a pragmatic eye to the
future being a constant Campbell virtue.

You've got to grind that corn fine for tea ckes, but cane syrup both
sweetens and eases down the hard and gritty edges.

Actually, I suspect that cast iron "Dutch Ovens", suitable for marvelous
biscuits, the ambrosia of the South, or even "Spoonbread" by which all men
are not rendered equal, out numbered built in ovens well into the 20th
century in much of the South.

TMO