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Pineapple Short-Cake
A couple of hours before bringing the cake on the table, take a very ripe, finely-flavored pineapple, peel it, cut it as thin as wafers, and sprinkle sugar over it liberally; then cover it close. For the short-cake take sufficient flour for one pie-dish, of butter the size of a small egg, a tablespoonful or two of sugar, the yolk of an egg, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a very little salt, and milk enough to make a very soft dough. Do not knead the dough, but just barely mix it, and press it into the pie-plate. The baking powder and butter, sugar and salt, should be rubbed well through the flour, and the other ingredients then quickly added. When time to serve, split the cake, spread the prepared pineapple between the layers, and serve with nothing but sugar and sweet cream. VIII. Puddings and their Sauces.
PUDDINGS are either steamed, baked or boiled, and are made with and without fruits. Bread, flour, rice, tapioca, corn starch, and various other gelatinous substances are used. Pudding sauces are made hard or liquid, and generally somewhat acid.
The recipe gives no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no baking time, all of which were assumed knowledge in 1900. The trailing paragraph about puddings belongs to the next chapter heading, not to this cake.
- The hinge: barely mix itThe instruction not to knead is the whole recipe. Rub the butter and dry ingredients together, add the yolk and milk, and stop stirring the moment the dough holds together as a shaggy, sticky mass. Press it into the pan with floured fingertips rather than rolling it.
- "Sufficient flour for one pie-dish"About 2 cups of flour will fill a standard 9-inch pie plate to a layer roughly 3/4 inch thick. This is genuinely approximate in the original; judge by the dough, which should be softer than biscuit dough and just short of a batter.
- Butter the size of a small eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Period cookbooks commonly sized fat by comparison to an egg or a walnut, at a time when kitchen scales were not standard equipment in home kitchens.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given at all; the original assumes the cook can judge her own range. The book does not specify an oven heat for this cake, so the following is an editorial suggestion: bake at about 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the top is dry and lightly browned and a skewer comes out clean.
- Splitting a soft cakeSplit it while still warm, using a long serrated knife or by pulling it apart with two forks. A single thick round split horizontally is what the recipe intends; it will be crumbly, which is correct.
- The pineappleTwo hours of sugaring draws out enough juice to soak the lower layer, which is the point. Slice it "thin as wafers" across the fruit, cut out the woody core, and keep the accumulated syrup to spoon over. Canned pineapple in juice works but gives a flatter, less acid result.
- Sweet creamIn this period "sweet cream" means cream that has not soured, not whipped or sweetened cream. Pour it over unwhipped, cold, with sugar alongside.
- YieldOne pie-plate-sized cake serves about six modestly. Assemble close to serving, as the recipe directs ("when time to serve"); the juice will soften the lower layer fairly quickly.
Nineteenth-century American short-cake was a biscuit dough, not a sponge, and strawberry short-cake was its defining form; pineapple appears here as the fashionable alternative. Fresh pineapple is often said to have become more widely available in northern American cities as steamship routes from Cuba and the Bahamas shortened the voyage in the 1870s and 1880s, and it stayed enough of a luxury that a cookbook could specify "a very ripe, finely-flavored" one as a matter of course. The macerating step, sugar drawn over sliced fruit under a cover for an hour or two, is the same technique the strawberry version uses, and it does the work that no cooked filling is here to do.