TOliver wrote:
>
>
> Not many of our ancestors here in the South, especially the ScotsIrish sort
> from whom I'm descended on most of one side, Campbells and Clarks,

Campbells are Highland Scots and not likely to have been Scot-Irish.
Highland Scots came directly to the Carolinas -- Cape Fear area of North
Carolina and Pee Dee River area of South Carolina in the 18th century.

would
> have had much in the way of ovens (other than the warming holes built into
> the sides of large fireplaces), nor would they have had much in the way of
> breastplates or bucklers (but maybe an occasional gorget ripped from the
> neck of a fallen pink-cheeked British cornet as we looted/retrieved personal
> property from the dead and soon to be so on random sites of minor
> engagements), so our "tea cakes" would have likely been of the "griddle"
> sort of among the middle class (while the wee and puir subsisted on hoe
> cakes, cooked on the blade of the hoe).....
>
> A couple of sidenotes....My Clark ancestors (as in General Elijah,
> Revoltionary hero - one of the figures from whom Mel Gibson's composite was
> formed in that ghastly cinepic, "The Patriot", founder of Clark County (and
> Athens and UJawja, I guess or so claims the memorial plinth outside the
> gates of the place), dreadful despoiler and dispossessor of Native 'Merkins,
> etc., acquired some wealth post-Revolution and would have likely hada
> kitchen with a bricj fireplace with oven(s) built into the sides. Some of
> the Campbells (of the non-Tory sort) would have been likely to have acquired
> assets to afford such cultured frippery, likely taking over the lands and
> chattels, human and livestock, of their relatives/fellow clansmen, the Tory
> Campbells fled for their lives to Novia Scotia, etc., a pragmatic eye to the
> future being a constant Campbell virtue.
>
> You've got to grind that corn fine for tea ckes, but cane syrup both
> sweetens and eases down the hard and gritty edges.

Tea cakes are cookies, not pancakes. They are made with wheat flour,
not cornmeal. Since you have never eaten one, why don't you ask some of
your relatives who cook -- and they don't have to have any Scots
heritage. Tea cakes were made by pretty much everyone, regardless of
heritage, when I was a child. I have my paternal grandmother's recipe
and she is overwhelmingly English back to Jamestown with a French
huguenot thrown in here and there for punctuation. I simply have a
thesis that their origin was in Scotland because "tea" as a light meal
originated in Scotland in the 18th century and there was a large
immigration of Scots to the South in the 18th century.

>
> Actually, I suspect that cast iron "Dutch Ovens", suitable for marvelous
> biscuits, the ambrosia of the South, or even "Spoonbread" by which all men
> are not rendered equal, out numbered built in ovens well into the 20th
> century in much of the South.
>
> TMO
>
>