YOUR MAMA'S KITCHEN

Aunt's tea cakes leave a sweet legacy

By Bob Leggett
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Elbert Mackey has been in the Air Force, doing Air Force things. He's worked in nuclear security, too, making sure nobody breached a sensitive site with evil on their minds.

But that was in his other life. Now Mackey, 60, lives in Cedar Park and cooks tea cakes for a living. Lots of tea cakes, too. Big fat ones, small flat ones, crunchy and mushy. None of that cinnamon-covered stuff either; that's a snickerdoodle . No sprinklings of sugar; those are sugar cookies.

Mackey is a tea-cake man, a guy whose obsession for his aunt Maggie Wimberly's tea cakes, the ones he ate as a child growing up near Minden, La., led him to gather recipes wherever he traveled around the world and eventually to compile a book of tea cake recipes.

"Aunt Maggie lived way out in the backwoods in a place called Blue Ridge," Mackey says. "I lived with my grandmother after my mother died, and we would go on trips after school, visiting this family and that family. We had to be out of the woods by dark, though. You know how that was."

Mackey's Aunt Maggie always had food in the house. "She loved to cook, and I loved to eat," Mackey says. "The tea cakes really caught my fancy. I thought they were the best things on the planet."

Unfortunately, Aunt Maggie died without writing anything down. "I'm not sure she could write," Mackey says. "She died with that in her head, and I never saw her make them because they were always ready when we got there." But those sweet, vanilla-flavored cakes, almost shortbreads in some recipes, never left Mackey's consciousness.

"I tried to duplicate that taste. I tried for many years. I tried European ingredients, but that didn't taste like it, either. I finally came up with something that's close to it."

Mackey took his Aunt Maggie's recipe with him to a recent family reunion in Shreveport, La., and says that many of his relatives thought he got close to her old recipe.

"I'm pretty much pleased with it now," he says. "(Tea cake) is a very basic recipe, so it comes down to proportions, how much of everything you put in there. I don't know if this was a black thing, but they didn't have to go out and buy anything. They had all the (simple) ingredients right in the cabinet."

Of course, tea cakes are a universal treat and everybody makes them slightly different. Mackey's wife, Jacquie, grew up in California and ate tea cakes prepared by a friend's mother. They were thinner, had a greater diameter and were made without the nutmeg and powdered malt that Mackey puts into his Aunt Maggie's cakes. "But lots of vanilla is the key to any recipe," he says.

It all comes down to childhood memories, and that's what makes Mackey's recipe book such an important tool. It allows contributors to keep alive the special memories they carry from their own childhoods.

"I have had every tea cake recipe in that book," Jacquie Mackey says.

"It's a very simple recipe, but it's something from my childhood that I loved," Elbert Mackey says. "I wish I'd known back then to ask about things like that."

mleggett@statesman.com; 756-8918

Elbert's Favorite Tea Cakes

1 stick unsalted butter

1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening

2 cups sugar

3 brown eggs, lightly beaten

1 Tbsp. vanilla

5 cups white flour

5 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. nutmeg

1 tsp. premium malted-milk powder

4 Tbsp. evaporated milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Cream the butter, shortening and sugar thoroughly. Add beaten eggs and vanilla. Mix well.

Sift together the dry ingredients. Add 4 cups dry ingredients (1 cup at a time) to cream mixture, beating well after each addition. Add 2 Tbsp. of evaporated milk and beat well. Add final cup of dry ingredients to mixture, beating well until incorporated. Add final 2 Tbsp. of evaporated milk and beat well.

Use a medium ice cream scoop to dip up batter and pat out dough to desired size and place on a cookie sheet fitted with a baking mat.

Bake for about 15 minutes or until brown. Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan and placing on cooling rack.

Scotland Tea Cakes

1 cup butter (no substitutes)

2 eggs, beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

2 cups sugar

4 cups self-rising flour

1/2 cup buttermilk

Mix sugar and butter. Beat well. Add eggs and buttermilk, plus vanilla. Beat after each addition. Knead dough. Roll out on waxed paper and cut tea cakes with biscuit cutter. Place on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until done.

- Sgt. Sylvia Dorsey, Royal Air Force, Alconbury, United Kingdom

Tea cake trivia

• An English invention dating back nearly 200 years, tea cakes remain a favorite snack for coffee breaks and church socials.

• Some recipes call for milk, others buttermilk, vinegar, cream and even molasses as the main wet ingredient.

• Elbert Mackey set up a Web site, www.teacakeproject.com , to help him gather other recipes from around the world.

• Get tea cake recipes and some Southern history in `The Tea Cake Roundup' by Elbert Mackey ($19.95, Infinity Publishing, www.buybooksontheweb.com).

Share a family recipe

Pretty much everybody not raised in a cave by bears has one, that favorite home-cooked dish that can bring joy and peacefulness just by the very thought of it. Maybe mom cooked it, or grandma, or dad, or Uncle Ramon. We'd like to hear from readers about the dish and possibly feature the recipe in this monthly column called Your Mama's Kitchen by American-Statesman writer Mike Leggett. If the dish is picked, Leggett will visit with you as you prepare it, hear about its special meaning to you and maybe even get a taste. Contact Leggett at mleggett@statesman.com or 512-756-8918.