A Guide to the Best of Southern California : FOOD : Sweet Success

Etha Robinson can’t count how many times she has heard customers exclaim, “Tea cakes! I haven’t had these in years. . . .”

“It’s a simple cookie, really, but for many people, especially Southerners, it has a powerful emotional association. It’s comfort food,” says the entrepreneur behind Mrs. Robinson’s Tea Cakes.

It took her months to perfect a recipe for the sweet--a rich shortbread, dense, buttery and fragrant with nutmeg or lemon--that she sells for $5 a pound. And during that time, Robinson, a retired schoolteacher, did her homework, tracing the cookie to the slaves of the antebellum South. It seems they had tried to re-create the little cakes devoured by their owners but, because some ingredients were off limits, came up with something closer to a cookie.

Mrs. Robinson’s Tea Cakes is on the first level of Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza, 3650 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 292-7556