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Cream Shortcake
One quart flour, three teaspoons baking powder, a piece of butter or lard the size of an egg, mix all with milk or water, a little salt. Roll out on two pie plates, when done split them open carefully and put between and over, this mixture:
A plain baking-powder shortcake, unsweetened, baked in two rounds and split. The recipe breaks off before naming the filling, so that part is yours to supply.
- The missing mixtureThe text ends with a colon and no filling. Given the title, sweetened whipped cream, or crushed sweetened fruit with cream, is the likely intent. Anything soft and moist works, since the cake itself is dry and unsweetened.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, that is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz. Weigh about 500 g if you want consistency.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. This is a lean dough by modern shortcake standards; doubling the fat gives a more tender crumb without changing anything else.
- LeaveningThree teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards, which usually call for about a teaspoon per cup; four teaspoons would be closer to current practice.
- A little saltRead this as 1 teaspoon. The dough has no sugar at all, so the salt is doing most of the seasoning work.
- Pie plates as pansTwo 9-inch pie plates or cake pans. Pat the dough in rather than rolling it thin; each round should be about half an inch thick so there is something to split.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A hot oven, around 425-450F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly coloured, suits this dough.
- Splitting while hotSplit each round immediately out of the oven, using the tines of a fork to pull the halves apart rather than a knife, which compresses the crumb. Butter the cut faces while they are still steaming.
- YieldTwo rounds, serving six to eight. Like most biscuit doughs, it is best eaten the day it is made.
Cream shortcake belongs to the older American line of shortcake, which is a biscuit rather than a sponge: flour, fat, salt and a chemical leavening, baked stiff and then split so that fruit and cream can be layered through it. The name has nothing to do with height or richness; "short" describes dough made tender, or short, by fat cutting through the gluten, the same sense preserved in shortbread and shortcrust. Recipes of this kind multiplied after commercial baking powder became widely available in the second half of the nineteenth century, replacing the fussier saleratus-and-sour-milk method and putting a hot split cake within reach of a cook working alone in the half hour before a meal.