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Grandmother's Strawberry Short-Cake
Take a coffee-cup of cream or sour milk, beat into it a little salt and a small teaspoonful of soda, and before it stops foaming stir in enough flour to enable you to roll it out, but be sure not to get it very stiff. Roll into three circles, spread butter on top of each, and place one on top of the other. Bake until well done, then pull the three layers apart, butter one and cover with strawberries, then butter the second and lay, crust downwards, over the first; then another layer of strawberries, and cover with the third crust. Set in the oven a few minutes, and then, before serving hot, with cream, cover the top crust with large fresh strawberries. Before making the crust, stir into three pints of ripe, rich strawberries a coffee-cup of granulated sugar, and leave it covered over until the crust is done. If cream or sour milk is not plenty, use sweet milk, and sift into the flour two teaspoonfuls (scant) of baking powder, and as you roll out spread on three tablespoonfuls of ice-cold butter. Pounded ice is excellent eaten on top of a saucer of sugared berries. Wrap the ice in a clean, coarse towel, and pound fine with a potato-masher.
A biscuit shortcake, not a sponge, and the whole method depends on butter between the layers before baking so they can be pulled apart afterward. Everything else is straightforward once the old measures are converted.
- A coffee-cupTreat it as one standard 8 oz cup, both for the liquid and for the sugar on the berries. Period cup measures were not standardised and varied from house to house, but a cup is close enough for a dough this forgiving.
- Sour milk and sodaThe soda needs acid to work. Genuine sour milk or the slightly soured cream of a 19th-century dairy provided it; today use buttermilk. Fresh milk left on the counter is spoiled, not soured, and will not do the job.
- The baking-powder versionThe alternative given at the end: sweet milk, two scant teaspoons baking powder sifted into the flour, and three tablespoons of very cold butter spread on as you roll. With no acid present the soda has nothing to react with, so leave it out in that case.
- How much flourNo quantity is given because it depends on your liquid. Expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups for one cup of buttermilk. Stop as soon as the dough will roll out — a stiff dough here gives a tough, dry cake.
- Oven heatUnspecified in the original. Bake as you would biscuits, 425F, 15 to 20 minutes, until the layers are browned and firm enough to lift apart cleanly.
- Buttering before bakingThis is the hinge of the recipe. The butter spread between the stacked circles keeps them from fusing, so the baked cake splits into three tender-edged layers rather than being cut. Skip it and you will be sawing at a solid disc.
- The berriesThree pints is about 2 to 2 1/4 lb, and 6 cups by volume. Sugaring them first and leaving them covered draws out syrup — about an hour, the time the crust takes; much longer and they collapse.
- Pounded iceThe closing note describes making crushed ice by hand with a towel and a potato masher. Any ice crusher or a few pulses in a blender does the same. A coarse towel and a mallet still works if you like the ceremony.
- YieldNo yield is given; a three-layer cake from one cup of liquid will serve roughly 6 to 8. Assemble and serve immediately; the layers soften quickly once the berry syrup is in contact with them.
"Short" in shortcake refers to fat shortening the dough, and the American version is most often a biscuit rather than the sweetened sponge sold under the name today, though sponge and cake-based shortcakes appear in 19th-century American cookbooks alongside the biscuit form. Strawberry shortcake became a fixture of late-spring cooking in the United States in the second half of the 19th century, tied to the short local berry season and to the church and grange strawberry festivals that marked it. The recipe's two versions preserve a genuine transition: the older leavening of sour milk with saleratus, which required a household with a dairy and an acid to spare, and the newer commercial baking powder, which by 1900 had made the older method optional.