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Biscuit Short Cake
Follow the recipe for Baking Powder Biscuits, dividing the mixture into two parts. Lightly rub two medium-sized layer-cake pans with Snowdrift and pat half of the mixture into each, making it even. Bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., then put together with any one of the following combinations, spreading a part of the mixture on top. No.1. One quart hulled and halved strawberries, sweetened to taste and allowed to stand for at least fifteen minutes. A hint of cinnamon may be added, if desired.
No. 2. One quart of sliced bananas, oranges, peaches, or other fruits sweetened to taste and chilled for half an hour, No. 3. Sliced canned pears or apricots, or stewed peaches or apricots-using the juice as a foundation for a fruit sauce. Substitute this liquid as far as it will go in the recipe for Lemon Sauce given in this book.
Any of these Short Cakes should be served warm and may be accompanied by Hard Sauce, Lemon Sauce, or cream.
A shortcake built on biscuit dough rather than sponge, baked as two thin rounds in cake pans. Everything here depends on the biscuit recipe elsewhere in the book, so read that first.
- SnowdriftA brand of hydrogenated cottonseed shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company; the book exists to promote it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter gives better flavor in both the dough and the greased pans.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe calls 375F a "hot oven," which is at the low end of what that phrase usually meant. Take the number, not the adjective: 375F for 15 minutes suits two thin rounds, and they are done when the tops are dry and lightly colored.
- Layer-cake pans"medium-sized" layer-cake pans of the era were probably 8- or 9-inch rounds. In a 9-inch pan the dough will be quite thin, which is what makes the two-layer assembly work; pat it out evenly to the edges.
- Strawberries need the standing timeFifteen minutes with sugar is about the minimum for the berries to give up juice, and half an hour is better. Without that syrup the biscuit stays dry, though the recipe does also offer cream or a sauce alongside.
- The other fruits are chilled, not maceratedThe other fruits are sweetened and chilled -- bananas, oranges and peaches are sweetened and held cold for half an hour, so they may throw less juice than berries left to stand at room temperature. With those combinations, cream or one of the sauces alongside is worth considering.
- Canned-fruit variationFor No. 3 you are draining the syrup from the tin (or the liquid from stewed fruit) and using it in place of as much of the liquid as it will cover in the book's Lemon Sauce. Taste before adding more sugar or lemon.
- Serve warm, same dayBiscuit dough goes tough and dry within hours. Assemble just before serving; two rounds should give roughly six to eight portions.
This is a promotional cookbook: Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, and the book's purpose was to show home cooks that the new tinned fat could do everything lard and butter did. Biscuit shortcake is the older and more American of the two shortcake traditions — a sweetened or plain baking-powder dough split and filled, as opposed to the sponge-cake cups that grocers later sold ready-made — and strawberry shortcake of this kind was a fixture of early-summer American tables through the nineteenth century. The alternate fillings are a sign of the period's expanding canned-goods trade: pears and apricots in tins, and bananas and oranges shipped north by rail, meant a dessert once tied to a two-week strawberry season could be put on the table well beyond it.