My maternal grandmother, Elsie Dona Gassett Mitchell, was born on April 1, 1909 so it is fitting this blog begins on her birthday with a recipe that defines my grandmother, my mother, and my childhood. The Teacake. Simple. Slightly sweet. Southern.

My grandmother only completed nine school grades. The 9^th grade was the last grade available to her to attend at the time.  Yet her penmanship, grammar, and spelling were perfect, and she was a voracious reader. As child I was fascinated by comics and jokes. She would cut funny stories and cartoons out of magazines and newspapers and save them for me to glue into spiral notebooks. One of our family’s most treasured things is the journal my grandmother kept. Starting from her birth, she recalls stories of her childhood, family history, struggles of daily life, the simplicities she cherished and her constant faith. I have read some of these stories so many times I have them memorized. One of my favorites is her describing her maternal grandfather:

“My grandfather McCleskey made his livelihood trapping and would make trips on foot from Montgomery County Texas to Illinois. Some of my happiest times as a child were the times he would be with us and according to the time of year I could help him plant a radish bed, pick wild berries, or tramp in the woods as he sang Irish folk songs.”

In my grandmother’s stories, she describes food of all sorts: the bread her mother made, her father’s boiled peanuts, collecting mayhaws to make jelly and her recipe for mincemeat using pears. But there is no mention of teacakes. Where did she learn to make them? My Aunt Ethel, the oldest child, says she assumes my grandmother learned from her mother. Perhaps we shall never know.  All we have are recipes cards, most of them bearing the label “GRANDMOTHER MITCHELL’S TEACAKES.”

Don’t let the name teacake fool you. The teacake is neither a cake nor is it served with tea in our family. And while the variations are numerous, the beauty of my grandmother’s teacakes lies in their simplicity which reflected the times she lived and the lack of money to buy extravagant ingredients such as powdered sugar.

Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother standing at the sideboard in her kitchen rolling out teacakes with a flour covered rolling pin.  Once cooked, she kept them in a clear jar with a screw-on lid—-we kids were convinced that lid was to deter our sneaking a cookie.  Screw-on lids make a lot of noise in their removal. The adults in our family would sit in the afternoon, visiting and playing dominos, while they drank coffee and ate teacakes. We kids got our own teacakes usually with a glass of milk.  However, if we were lucky, grandmother would make a saucer of coffee (more cream and sugar than coffee) for us to dunk our teacakes in and pretend to be adults. The ritual of coffee and teacakes was repeated no matter the house you visited. All of our aunts made teacakes. One of the best parts of “visiting” family was the plate of teacakes sitting on a table waiting to be eaten.  To this day, when I bake teacakes, I imagine sitting down with my saucer of coffee wishing I was old enough to sit at the “adult” table and play dominos.

GRANDMOTHER MITCHELL’S TEACAKES

1/2 cup butter

½ tsp salt

1/2 cup shortening

2 Tbsp milk

1 1/2  cup sugar

2 Tbsp lemon extract

1 Tbsp baking powder

2 eggs

3 cups flour

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Beat together sugar, shortening and butter until smooth. Add eggs, milk and lemon extract. Beat until combined. Add baking powder, salt and flour. Beat until smooth.

2. Refrigerate dough until cold (or overnight).

3. Roll out dough thin (approx. 1/4^th inch) onto lightly floured board.

4. Cut dough using knife. You can use a cookie cutter if you wish, but my grandmother just cut the dough into squares as pictured below. This will create odd shapes on the edges of the dough but will also give you the 2 choices of cookies: chewy soft teacakes from the inside squares and teacakes with crispy corners from the pieces cut along the edge of the dough.

5. Place onto a greased cookie sheet. I like to use parchment paper. Bake for 10 minutes. Notice the odd shapes in the photo below.

6. Allow to cool completely and then place in a container to store. And as my grandmother noted on her recipe card “ENJOY WITH COFFEE, MILK OR LEMONADE.”

TWO HELPFUL TIPS I HAVE LEARNED FROM OTHER HOME COOKS:

–Never over bake cookies. When you take cookies out of the oven they should appear slightly under baked. The cookies will continue to cook on the cookies sheet before they start to cool. If you leave cookies in the oven until they appear done, you will always have a hard, crunchy cookie.

–When storing cookies in a container, especially in a climate with humidity, place a half of piece of bread in the cookie jar. The bread will absorb the moisture and your cookies will stay softer longer.