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Red Raspberry Shortcake
4 cups sifted flour, 3 tablespoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons Crisco, milk, and 2 quarts red raspberries. Sift baking powder and salt with flour, rub in Crisco; then with fork stir in lightly and quickly sufficient milk to make soft dough--too soft to roll. Turn it into Criscoed tin, and bake in hot oven 30 minutes. Unmold, and leaving it inverted, cut circle around top within 1 inch of edge; lift off circle of crust, and with fork pick out crumb from center, leaving about 3/4 of an inch of biscuit around sides. Spread inside cake with butter, fill with crushed raspberries, which have been standing 1/2 hour or more mixed with enough sugar to sweeten them. Turn off juice from berries before filling cake. Replace circle of crust, and serve with following sauce: 1/2 pound marshmallows, 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar, and 1/2 cup boiling water. Cut marshmallows in pieces and melt in double boiler. Dissolve sugar in boiling water, add to marshmallows, and stir until blended. Serve hot with shortcake.
A tall baking-powder biscuit baked in one pan, hollowed out and packed with sweetened fruit — the older American form of shortcake, closer to a filled loaf than to the split-and-stacked version. Two details need attention before you start: the leavening is high by modern standards, and the dough must be wet enough that rolling is impossible.
- Hot ovenBake at 425-450F. At 30 minutes a 4-cup biscuit dough baked in a single pan will be well browned; check the center with a skewer, since the loaf has to hold its shape once hollowed.
- The baking powder3 tablespoons for 4 cups flour is more than most modern biscuit recipes call for, at a time when powders varied in strength. With a fresh double-acting powder, 2 tablespoons should give ample lift.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works; 2 tablespoons is a very lean biscuit, so the fat is doing almost nothing but tenderizing. Butter can be substituted at the same weight for more flavor. "Criscoed tin" simply means a greased pan.
- The tinNo size is given. A 9-inch round cake pan or an 8-inch square, both at least 2 inches deep, holds this quantity and leaves enough depth to hollow out a cavity.
- Soft dough is the hinge"Too soft to roll" is the instruction that decides the result. Stir in milk — expect somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups — until the dough is a thick, shaggy batter that drops from the fork. A dough stiff enough to handle bakes dense and will not tear away cleanly when you pick out the crumb.
- Berries2 quarts of raspberries is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 pounds. Sugar them and let them stand at least half an hour so they give up juice, then drain that juice off as directed, or the biscuit walls may soften and collapse. The drained syrup is worth serving alongside.
- Marshmallow sauceHalf a pound is 8 ounces. Modern marshmallows melt readily in a double boiler; keep the heat gentle and stir, as they scorch and turn stringy over direct flame. The sauce sets as it cools, so make it last and serve hot.
- YieldNo yield is given; a cake of this size will serve about 8. It is best eaten soon after filling, since the crumb softens as the fruit stands in it.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911; that explains why a plain biscuit shortcake specifies the brand by name and why the fat turns up throughout the book, sometimes in token amounts like the 2 tablespoons here. The dish itself is the older American shortcake: one thick baking-powder biscuit rather than individual split cakes, hollowed and filled, a method found in nineteenth-century household cookery. Commercial marshmallows became cheap and widely available in the 1900s and 1910s, and cookbooks of the period used them melted as a sweet sauce, a folded-in mousse base, and a broiled topping.