Yorkshire Teacakes

There's a particular kind of afternoon that asks for a teacake. The light has gone flat by three o'clock, the rain is doing whatever rain does in November, and the only sensible response is to put the kettle on and toast something fruited. This is what teacakes are for. They aren't a breakfast, exactly, and they aren't a pudding. They occupy that quiet middle ground where tea is served and the day pauses for twenty minutes.

I made my first batch of these after reading about them in an old Yorkshire cookery book. The recipe was barely a recipe, more like a list of proportions scribbled by someone who'd made them every week for forty years and couldn't quite see why anyone would need to write it down. That's the spirit. A teacake is a soft enriched dough with currants in it, baked flat enough to split, sturdy enough to hold butter without collapsing. There's nothing clever going on. The cleverness is in the ritual: the splitting, the toasting until the currants catch and turn sticky, the butter melting into the cut surface, the first bite while it's still almost too hot to eat.

Make them on a Sunday and you've got teatime sorted for most of the week. They keep well in a tin, and they get better, not worse, on day two. I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made them properly: "Currants. Cinnamon. Sticky. Tuesday again tomorrow." That's the kind of meal this is. Quiet, useful, the sort of thing you want to have around.