Tea Cakes
Tea cakes. Oh, that takes me back.
Yeah, I remember tea cakes. My mother used to hold church get-togethers at our house, with her friends in the Women’s Fundamentalist Brigade.
Each week, they met in our living room to talk about mortal sin, human depravity, the horrors of hell, and dancing.
These upright women were supposed to be reading their Bibles and praying and talking about how bad missionaries have it. But instead, they spoke in hushed whispers about which woman in town had gone into childlabor six months after her own wedding.
Even so, the church meetings at our house were a great event. All the women arrived, wearing fancy clothes. Lots of polyester. Tall hair, laden with enough hairspray to qualify as a fire hazard. Coral lipstick—the official shade of nice women.
Most of the women wore pearls. “But,” my mother was quick to point out on one occasion, “hardly any of us wears REAL pearls.”
“But,” I asked, “if they’re not real, what are they?”
“Whatever was on sale at Belk.”
The living room would smell like Estée Lauder, Opium, and Chanel No. 5. If you were a little boy, and you were to walk through this room without a gas mask, you would die.
But it’s the tea cakes I remember most. Because tea cakes are essentially big cookies, and I love cookies.
However—and I can’t stress this enough—don’t ever call teacakes “cookies.” Especially in the presence of the woman who baked them, otherwise she will castrate you with quilting shears.
They are “tea cakes.”
The difference between a tea cake and a cookie is subtle but important. A cookie is a large, dense, floury wafer made with sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and milk.
A tea cake, however, is a large, dense floury wafer made with sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and milk.
Is everyone clear on that?
These women would bring tea cakes of all varieties and they would place them on the kitchen counter, wrapped in tin foil.
The kitchen would soon come alive with the sounds of many alto and soprano voices. From a distance, it sounded like a flock of geese invading our home.
My cousin and I would sneak into the kitchen and confiscate tea cakes by placing them into our pockets by the fistful. Eventually an elderly matriarch would notice us.
“Those cakes aren’t for you!” the righteous woman would say, while shooing us with her high heel.
And we would be banished outdoors. “Go outside!” my mother would say.
This is what adults were always saying to us back then. “Go outside!” Adults said this to us every time we had interaction with them. As a result, we practically lived out of doors.
It’s a wonder we didn’t die of exposure.
Still, I can remember those tea cakes. I remember way those women would all sit on folding chairs, eating cakes, with small bites, sipping their tea, crossing their legs daintily, in that formal way females once crossed their legs.
Few young women cross their legs anymore. I suppose this is because so few wear skirts or dresses.
I remember when I was college age, I went to a party at the University of Alabama and I noticed that none of the young women were crossing their legs. It struck me as odd.
“Why don’t women cross their legs anymore, Mama?” I once asked my mother.
“Why are you looking at her legs?” replied my mother. Then she told me to go outside.
The older I get, the further away from that bygone era I drift. It was an era of Betty Crocker cookbooks, AM radios, and KitchenAid mixers. And it all seems so distant.
I recall the way my mother would let me taste raw dough, or cake batter, or help her sift flour. I remember how she cooked by feel. I remember cheese straws. Crustless sandwiches. Chicke divan.
I come from simple people. Nobody had ever heard of a mobile phone. There was no internet.
We kids entertained ourselves with checkers and Monopoly. And when we were hard up for entertainment, we found new, creative ways to give each other subdural hematomas.
We climbed trees. We held bike races. We played Army. We played cops and robbers. We stayed in the woods until a lone adult voice shouted our name.
Whereupon we followed the sacred smell of supper toward home. Toward people who loved us.
And after a meager meal of meatloaf, or chicken, or Hamburger Helper, or pintos and cornbread sticks, if you were lucky, there were leftover tea cakes.