A Cookie With a Past

When I first walked into Mary Jordan’s restaurant two years ago, I was instantly reminded of the Southern kitchens I’d grown up eating in. A replica of a wood-burning stove stood in one corner; simple, square wooden tables were scattered about the dining room; a long, glass counter displayed Mississippi mud pies, apple and peach cobblers, sweet potato pies.

But there was something else in the small Monrovia place called Mama’s Oven that triggered a flood of childhood memories: a batch of freshly baked cookies.

“Are those tea cakes?” I asked Jordan, already knowing the answer. “It’s been years since I’ve seen tea cakes.”

“They sure are,” she answered, reaching under the counter for one of the spicy cookies. “Try one.”

Jordan--”Mama” to her customers--watched closely as I bit into the soft cookie. It was a lot thicker than I remembered, but the taste was the same.

There I was, back in Mississippi, a scrawny, long-legged 10-year-old peddling my red bicycle with my cousin Dee Dee on the handle bars. We were racing home because my sister was baking tea cakes, Dee Dee’s favorite snack. But then we crashed head-on into a neighbor boy riding his shiny new bike. Dee Dee flew off the handlebars, hitting her head on the dusty road.

My brother ran out when he heard Dee Dee’s screams and carried her into the house, where he laid her on a bed. Dee Dee, holding a cold towel on her head, raised herself up and asked, “Are the tea cakes ready?”

Back at Mama’s Oven, Jordan asked, “So, how is it?”

“Yeah,” I said, finishing off the last bits of the nutmeg-flavored cookie, “that’s it.”

Jordan, plump in the way a good cook should be, smiled. “That’s what everyone says,” she told me. “They say, ‘That’s just how Mama used to make them.’ ”

The last time I’d eaten a tea cake, I’d just graduated from high school and was living with my oldest sister in Milwaukee. Her mother-in-law used to mail shoe boxes full of tea cakes to my nieces and nephews, who always fought over them. But these days I eat tea cakes as often as I can find them.

“You get a glass of buttermilk and a tea cake and you think you’re in heaven,” says Jordan’s sister, Carolyn Goynes, who often helps out at the restaurant. “They’re just little sweet, buttery, flat cakes, something between a cookie and a cake.”

The sisters come around the counter, pull up chairs and talk about how their mother and grandmother used to make tea cakes “adding a pinch of this and a handful of that.”

“If you grew up poor,” says Goynes, the talkative one of the pair, “tea cakes were the closest thing to something sweet that you got.”

But neither Jordan nor Goynes learned how to make tea cakes when they were growing up. And there was no written family recipe.

Only their sister, back in Oklahoma, remembered how to make them. When Jordan and Goynes moved to California, they’d call back home and ask her to bake a batch and mail them to California. The Oklahoma sister soon tired of this routine and sent Jordan and Goynes a recipe.

After sharing the cookies with friends, Jordan started selling tea cakes at her restaurant, which has been open two years on Colorado Blvd. “I thought they’d be a big hit,” Jordan says, “because it seems like no one makes them any more.”

Food historians say tea cakes evolved from an English recipe brought over by British settlers in the 18th Century. They were known as “little cakes” and were served with afternoon tea, but are called tea biscuits in Britain today.

The English tradition was kept in the South. But unlike the English, Southerners made them for snacks or for special occasions, especially at Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Each cook added her own special ingredients, such as almonds or grated lemon and orange rinds.

The basic recipe was passed down by word-of-mouth for generations. But in more recent years, tea cakes were considered forgotten until entrepreneurs, including Jordan, began marketing them.

Etha Robinson, 50, sells old-fashioned and lemon-flavored tea cakes at the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles. She developed her recipe from watching her grandmother Emma, who lived in the Mississippi Delta. Emma would dump fistfuls of ingredients into a large ceramic bowl and hand-mix the stiff batter before rolling it out and shoving the can-cut cookies into a wood-burning stove.

Robinson’s grandmother never said how much butter or sugar to add, but she gave her granddaughter this advice: “If you know how to cook, then you should know how much to put in.”

After graduating from Tougaloo College in Mississippi, Robinson left her hometown of Yazoo, Miss., and moved to California, where she worked for 27 years as a science teacher.

In 1985, Robinson and her two sisters opened Koletha’s Kitchen in Inglewood, specializing in Southern cooking and home-made ice cream. Although the restaurant was short-lived, the tea cakes were a hit. In 1988, she began selling the cookies in other restaurants and donating them as door prizes at community events.

Later, she set up a cart in the Plaza Pasadena. One day, while ringing up a customer’s order, Robinson looked up and saw a well-dressed elderly woman in her late 70s eyeing the tea cakes. Robinson offered her a sample.

“Oh, these wonderful little cookies, they bring back such fond memories,” said the woman, with large teardrops rolling down her cheeks. She bought two bags of tea cakes and told Robinson that she remembered when her grandmother made them in Georgia where she grew up.

Robinson moved “Mrs. Robinson’s Original Teacakes” to Fox Hills Mall in Culver City and eventually to the first floor of Crenshaw Plaza on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

She resigned her full-time teaching position two years ago to sell tea cakes, although she still teaches science part time to homebound students.

Robinson worked for months to develop her distinct version of tea cakes. People are shocked to see her marketing tea cakes, she says, because it’s rarely done.

Carrie Hunt, passing by Robinson’s cart recently while shopping recently in Crenshaw Plaza, says she was surprised to see tea cakes being sold, but she’s always known that a business-minded person could make a profit selling them.

“I can still remember the smell of my grandmother’s tea cakes,” says Hunt, tasting a sample of the old-fashioned tea cakes. “I can still hear her say, ‘Come in for some hot tea cakes.’ ”

Hunt, a Texas native who works as a cashier at the L.A. County jail, Sybil Brand Institute for Women, bakes tea cakes at home for co-workers and for annual family reunions.

“Tea cakes are still a favorite in my family,” says Hunt, a 47-year-old mother of two. “It’s a tradition, a poor folks’ dessert.”

“Growing up, we had plenty of milk and butter,” says 79 year-old Erie Knox. “We lived on a farm and we could make (tea cakes) just like we wanted them.”

Knox is still making tea cakes. Born in Texas, she moved to California in 1959 and spent 20 years as a hairdresser. Nowadays, she spends her time canning fruit and vegetables. Her cupboards are filled with jars of pear, peach and apple preserves, and pickled squash. She makes grape juice and jelly out of fruit from her Concord grape vine in the back yard of her Los Angeles home. Sometimes, she goes to her niece’s home in Lynwood to pick apricots for canning.

On other days she bakes tea cakes for church members and her family. But as soon as she puts them in the cookie jar, her son eats them. She’s come a long way from the days when her mother would put tea cakes in a flour sack and hang them up in the pantry to stay moist.

Martha Holloway, 72, also knows a lot about tea cakes. She’s been making them for 50 years. “They’re just plain little sugar cookies,” she says. “They practically melt in your mouth. A baby could eat them.”

A soft-spoken Texas native, Holloway says she uses a “Texas tea cake” recipe that calls for a cup of butter. “Sugar cookies aren’t good without real butter.”

Holloway was born on a farm near Temple, Tex., where she grew up hearing tales from her Welsh, Scottish and Irish relatives, who told stories about hard-working people while they picked cotton.

Now retired from a career in bacteriology, Holloway herself became a professional story teller in 1981. Her favorite stories are Southern and Appalachian.

She remembers that during the 1920s her mother went to visit a neighbor, who wanted her to try oleomargarine.

“It tastes just like butter,” the neighbor said. “I’ll bet you can’t tell the difference.”

The neighbor blindfolded Holloway’s mother and put butter on one cracker and margarine on the other. Holloway’s mother admitted the margarine was good, but she still used only real butter in her tea cakes.

“She thought it made them taste better,” Holloway says. “And I do too.”

ERIE KNOX’S TEA CAKES

1 1/3 cups shortening

2 1/2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 teaspoon of salt

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon nutmeg

4 teaspoons vanilla

5 cups flour

6 tablespoons milk

Cream sugar and shortening in large bowl. Add eggs, salt, baking powder, nutmeg and vanilla. Mix at medium speed with electric mixer, gradually adding flour. Chill about 30 minutes.

Grease baking sheet. Roll out batter and cut with round cookie cutter. Place on baking sheet and bake in 350-degree oven 15 to 20 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen.