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Strawberry Short-Cake
Make a nice paste for the crust; roll out in thin cakes about the size of a breakfast-plate; put in a layer of strawberries with a light sprinkle of sugar, then another cake of dough, another layer of strawberries and sugar, with a top layer of dough; bake it slowly in an oven or stove, and eat for lunch or dessert, with sugar and butter sauce. This is the simple way to make strawberry short-cake; any other acid berry may be treated in the same manner. usual way for other fruits is to make them into tarts; but try cherries, stoned and made into a short-cake, and after the recipe for Grandmother's Short-cake. The
A layered short-cake built like a stacked pie rather than the split biscuit Americans expect today. The instructions are terse and the printed text is garbled at the end, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- What "a nice paste" meansIn period usage "paste" generally means a pastry dough — flour, cold fat, a little salt, water to bind — rather than a leavened biscuit dough, though the recipe does not say. A short-crust in the range of 2 cups flour to 3/4 cup fat rolls thin and stays crisp between the fruit layers; the proportions are a modern suggestion, as the original gives none.
- Size of the roundsA breakfast-plate is roughly 7 to 9 inches. You will need three rounds of that size, so scale the dough accordingly; the recipe gives no quantities at all.
- "Bake it slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven is conventionally reckoned at about 300–325F. Slow baking suits raw berries, which release juice and need time for the interior layers to set. Reckon on something like 40 to 50 minutes, judged by eye.
- The hinge: keep the middle from going to pasteRaw fruit sandwiched between thin pastry sheets soaks the dough. Toss the berries with a spoonful of flour or cornstarch along with the sugar, and do not overfill — a single close layer of halved berries per tier. Cooks who want a crisp result bake the three rounds separately and stack them after.
- Sugar and butter sauceProbably a creamed butter-and-sugar sauce of the hard-sauce type — butter beaten with roughly twice its volume of sugar, sometimes flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg or lemon and served soft so it melts into the hot cake. The recipe specifies nothing beyond sugar and butter.
- Cherries and other fruitCherries, stoned, are the substitution the author names; the recipe does not specify sour ones, and gives no revised sugar quantity. Otherwise the text extends the method only to "any other acid berry."
- Garbled textThe final lines of this entry are transposed in the original printing: the stray "The" belongs at the head of the sentence about tarts. "Grandmother's Short-cake" appears to be a cross-reference to another recipe in the book.
- YieldOne 8- to 9-inch stack serves six to eight, cut in wedges and served warm.
Short-cake in nineteenth-century American books was a broad term for any quick, rich, unyeasted cake — "short" being the older word for a crumbly, tender crumb, from which the fat called shortening takes its name. Two traditions ran alongside each other: the split biscuit, buttered and filled with crushed sweetened fruit, which is what most people now mean by strawberry shortcake, and the layered pastry version given here, closer to a fruit pie built in tiers. Strawberries were among the first fruits of the year in most of the country and did not keep, so a cake meant to be eaten the day it is made, "for lunch or dessert," reflects a household cooking to the season rather than the pantry. The instruction that any other acid berry may be treated the same way is typical of these books, which expected the cook to carry one method across whatever the garden produced.