Home › Village Receipts › Strawberry Short Cake
Strawberry Short Cake
Three eggs, one cup of sugar (scant), one cup of flour (generous), two tablespoons of cold water, one teaspoon of baking powder. Beat sugar and yolks of eggs hard together, beat whites and fold in last.
Bake in hot oven about fifteen minutes. Don't open oven door in ten minutes. Use strawberries, peaches of any fruit desired.
— Miss F. Victoria Myers
This is a fatless sponge — no butter, no milk — leavened mostly by beaten eggs, with the baking powder as insurance. Everything depends on how well the whites are folded in.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites carry the cake. Beat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold them into the yolk-sugar-flour base in three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain. Stirring them in flattens the batter and you get a rubbery slab.
- "Hot oven"In a book of this period that means roughly 400-425F. At that heat a thin sponge layer is done in the fifteen minutes given; check at twelve.
- Keeping the door shutSound advice for a cake raised on air. Opening the door early drops the oven temperature and the partly set foam collapses. Judge doneness by the cake springing back and pulling slightly from the pan edge.
- Scant and generousA scant cup is filled just below the rim, a generous cup heaped slightly — call it about 6.5 oz sugar and 4.5 oz flour. The ratio matters more than the exactness: slightly more flour than sugar by volume.
- FlourIf you want a finer, more tender crumb, use cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch. Sift it before measuring and again over the batter.
- Pan, which the recipe omitsThis quantity fits one 9-inch round or square pan, or two thin 8-inch layers if you want to split and fill. Grease and flour the bottom only; the batter needs the sides to climb.
- The shortcake itselfDespite the name this is a sponge, not a biscuit-dough shortcake. Split it warm, or slice it and layer with crushed sugared fruit and whipped cream shortly before serving -- it stales fast and is best the day it is made.
- YieldSix to eight servings with fruit and cream.
Community cookbooks like this one, assembled from contributions by named local women, are one useful record of what was actually being baked in American villages. Strawberry shortcake already meant two different things: in one tradition a sweetened biscuit dough split and heaped with berries, in the other a light sponge or cup cake used the same way. Miss Myers's version belongs to the second camp, with beaten eggs providing most of the lift and a teaspoon of baking powder as a hedge against a fallen cake. The instruction to substitute peaches or any other fruit is a reminder that these cakes were seasonal vehicles, made whenever something ripe was in the house.