Entry · catalog no. 4352
tea cakes
/ /tiː keɪks/ /TEE kayks
noun · The South; nationwide after the Great Migration · 1800s
✓ Verified
1.
A soft, slightly cakey sugar cookie: flour, sugar, butter or lard, egg, a little milk, vanilla or nutmeg. Rolled, cut, baked barely golden. In Black Southern households it is the everyday cookie, made from a memorized family recipe, kept in a tin or a Crisco can, and tied to church, funerals, Christmas and Juneteenth.
“She made tea cakes every Saturday and never once measured a thing.”
Origin & Attribution
The Black South, carried north and west in the Great Migration. The form is British — tea-table biscuits — but the tradition is Black American: enslaved cooks baked them for the slaveholders' tea tables and made an adapted version for their own families with sorghum or molasses in place of refined sugar and lard in place of butter. Zora Neale Hurston's use of Tea Cake as a man's pet name in 1937 is evidence enough that the word was warm, everyday Black Southern vocabulary well before anyone wrote a recipe down.
1937
Zora Neale Hurston names Vergible Woods Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God
2019
Toni Tipton-Martin's Jubilee places the sweet in two centuries of African American cooking
2020
Juneteenth revival pushes tea cakes back into wide circulation
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
The South; nationwide after the Great Migration · 1800s
Spoken by
Black Southern households; grandmothers and church cooks
$TEACAKThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Revived83 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
42/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1937
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
2020
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937
■
Toni Tipton-Martin, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking
2019
■
+ Cite a sourceToni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code
2015
See also