Home › Cakes › Peach Shortcake
Peach Shortcake
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful milk 5 eggs 3 cupfuls flour 3/4 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful almond extract Quartered peaches Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add milk, eggs one by one, always beating well between each one, flour sifted with baking powder and salt, then add extract. Mix and divide into two layer tins that have been greased with Crisco and bake twenty minutes in moderate oven. Turn out and spread with butter. Put together with quartered and sweetened peaches and pile some peaches on top.
Sufficient for one cake.
A Crisco-era layer cake dressed as shortcake — richer and sweeter than the biscuit dough most American cooks mean by the word. A few of the proportions and times want a second look.
- CriscoPlain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Any solid all-vegetable shortening works; 3/4 cupful is 6 fluid ounces by volume, roughly 5 oz by weight. Butter gives better flavour but a slightly tighter crumb, since shortening is 100% fat and butter about 82%.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally taken as 350-375F. The tins should go on a middle rack.
- The 20-minute bake is shortThe 20-minute bake looks short -- Three cups of flour, five eggs and a cup of milk split between two layers makes deep layers. In two 9-inch pans (a size the original does not specify) expect nearer 25-35 minutes in a moderate oven, and judge by a skewer coming out clean and the edges pulling from the tin rather than by the clock.
- Baking powder looks lowOne teaspoonful to three cupfuls of flour is well under modern practice (roughly a teaspoon per cup). The five eggs and the long creaming carry much of the lift, so the result is a close, pound-cake-like crumb by design — but 1915 baking powders also varied in strength, and the amount as printed is on the mean side.
- Layer tinsThe size is not given; two 9-inch rounds suit the quantity. Grease them and, if you like, line the bases with parchment. The batter is thick enough that it needs spreading level with a spatula.
- Buttering the hot layersDo this the moment they are turned out, while the crumb is warm enough to absorb it. This is the one step borrowed from real biscuit shortcake and it is worth not skipping.
- The peachesSugar the quartered fruit and let it stand 20-30 minutes so it gives up syrup; that juice is what keeps the assembled cake from tasting dry. Assemble shortly before serving or the layers go soggy.
- Almond extractA teaspoonful is assertive in a modern extract. Half is plenty if you want the peaches to lead.
- Yield'Sufficient for one cake': a two-layer cake, perhaps 10 to 12 servings depending on tin size. Whipped cream is not called for but is a usual accompaniment.
This comes from one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it launched in 1911; Marion Harris Neil wrote two of the principal ones, and Crisco is named in the ingredient list and again in the method, as it is in nearly every recipe in the book. The dish itself shows how loosely "shortcake" was already being used: the older American meaning is a rich biscuit dough split and filled with fruit, but the name is generally said to have drifted over time toward sweet layer cakes served the same way, and here the only trace of the original is the instruction to spread the hot layers with butter. Peaches place it firmly in high summer, which is how the parent book is organised by menu through the year, with the seasonal fruit falling where it falls.