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Short Cakes
Ordinary short cakes are simply made of pastry, sweetened with sugar, rolled out to the thickness of three-quarters of an inch, cut into pieces of any convenient size, baked, and served hot. In economical households these are frequently made of pastry that is left after making pies and tarts. Superior short cakes may be made as follows:--No. 1.--Rub half a pound of fresh butter into a pound of flour; add a pinch of salt, four table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, a beaten egg, and as much milk as will make a smooth paste. Roll out the pastry to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, stamp it into fancy shapes, and bake these on tins till crisp and lightly coloured. No. 2.--Put a pint of flour into a basin, and scoop a hollow place out of the centre. Dissolve a little more than half a tea-spoonful of soda in a tea-spoonful of boiling water. Stir this into half a pint of thick sour milk, and beat it well with a pinch of salt and three ounces of creamed butter. Pour this mixture into the hollow, and stir it with the flour to form a smooth paste. Roll it out on a floured board to the thickness of the third of an inch, stamp it into fancy shapes, and bake these on tins in a brisk oven. No. 3.--Rub six ounces of fresh butter into a pound of ground rice; add a pinch of salt and as much cold water as will make a smooth paste. Roll this out, stamp it into cakes, and bake in a brisk oven. No. 4.--Dissolve half a pound of fresh butter in a pint of milk. Stir in as much flour as will make a smooth, light paste. Roll this out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, cut it into large round cakes, and bake these in a frying-pan over a clear fire. Serve hot. A pinch of salt should be mixed with the flour. Time, ten minutes to bake the small cakes.
Four variations on the same idea: a stiff, rich, barely-sweet dough baked crisp. None of them is the American strawberry shortcake, and none needs much handling once the liquid goes in.
- The hingeThese are shortened doughs, not cake batters. Rub the butter into the flour until it is sandy, add just enough liquid to bring it together, and stop mixing the moment it coheres. No. 2 in particular, with soda and sour milk, begins reacting immediately and should go from bowl to oven quickly.
- Oven temperatures"Brisk" is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F (200-230C). Nos. 2 and 3 want that heat. No. 1, which is meant to colour only lightly, does better a little cooler. The recipe's own ten minutes is given for the small stamped cakes.
- A pint of flourAn old volume measure for a dry ingredient: an imperial pint of flour is roughly 10 oz / 285 g, scooped and levelled. If you prefer weight, use 10 oz and expect to adjust the liquid slightly.
- Thick sour milkNot spoiled fresh milk, which today's pasteurised milk will not do properly. Cultured buttermilk is the usual modern substitute: the acid is there to react with the soda. Half a pint is 10 fl oz imperial, about 1 1/4 US cups.
- SodaBicarbonate of soda, dissolved in hot water so it disperses evenly rather than leaving bitter flecks. A little more than half a teaspoon to a pint of flour is a modest lift; the cakes are meant to be short and dense, not fluffy.
- Ground riceCoarsely ground rice, close to rice flour. No. 3 has no gluten, so the dough is crumbly and handles badly on rerolling. The cakes bake to a sandy, shortbread-like texture and colour very little.
- No. 4 is a griddle cake"Bake these in a frying-pan over a clear fire" points to a moderately hot heavy pan or griddle; no fat is specified. Cook a few minutes each side until spotted brown and cooked through. The instruction to add "as much flour as will make a smooth, light paste" is genuinely open-ended: add flour to the pint of milk gradually until you have a soft rolling consistency.
- Sweetness and yieldFour tablespoons of sugar to a pound of flour is very lightly sweet by modern standards. No. 1 makes a large batch of small cakes stamped at 2 1/2 inches.
In nineteenth-century British usage a "short cake" was defined by its fat, not its shape: short meaning a dough so enriched with butter that the gluten cannot form long strands, the same sense preserved in shortbread and shortcrust. Cassell's opens with the frankly thrifty version, made from pie trimmings sweetened with sugar, which tells you where the form sat in a Victorian household economy: nothing was thrown away, and a tray of hot cakes could be produced from the scraps of the morning's tarts. The four "superior" versions trace a small map of period baking technique, from plain rubbed-in pastry, through the sour-milk-and-soda chemical leavening that spread through British and American kitchens after bicarbonate became cheap and reliable in the mid-1800s, to a ground-rice cake, and finally a griddle cake cooked over the fire rather than in the oven, the older method surviving alongside the newer. The relationship of the American strawberry shortcake to this family is unsettled: it may descend from the same shortened-dough tradition rather than simply having borrowed the name.