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Shortcake
1 quart flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 heaping teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 pint milk. Sift the flour, salt, and powder together, rub in the butter cold; add the milk and mix into a smooth dough, just soft enough to handle; divide in half, and roll out to the size of breakfast-plates; lay on a greased baking-tin and bake in hot oven twenty minutes; separate the cakes without cutting, as cutting makes them heavy.
A plain sweetened-by-its-filling shortcake dough, baked as two large rounds rather than individual biscuits. Everything hinges on handling it as little as possible.
- Quart of flourA quart of flour as kitchens of the period measured it is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 450-500 g. The pint of milk is 2 cups; expect to hold a little back, since modern flours vary in thirst.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 425-450F (220-230C). Twenty minutes at that heat is right for two plate-sized rounds; a cooler oven dries them out before they colour.
- Leavening is light by modern habitTwo heaping teaspoons of baking powder for 4 cups of flour is on the low side of current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup. If your rounds come out dense, increase to 4 teaspoons next time.
- Cold butter, rubbed inOnly 2 tablespoons of fat go into a pound of flour, so the flakiness comes almost entirely from keeping that butter in distinct cold flecks. Work it in with fingertips or a pastry blender and stop while the mixture still looks coarse.
- Handle the dough briefly"Mix into a smooth dough" means smooth, not kneaded. Bring it together in the bowl, pat or roll to about half an inch, and get it onto the tin.
- Separate, do not cutThe instruction that matters most, though the recipe does not make clear whether the two rounds are baked together and then parted or each round is split. Either way, part the layers by running a fork around the edge and pulling them apart, or lift the top off with your fingers while still warm. A knife compresses the crumb and gives the heavy, pasty layer the author warns against.
- Breakfast-plate sizeA breakfast plate of the period is usually reckoned at roughly 7 to 9 inches across, so each half-batch rolls to a round of about that width. The tin should be flat and greased, not a cake pan.
- Yield and servingTwo rounds, perhaps six to eight servings; the recipe does not say how many layers result. Nothing here is sweet, which is deliberate: butter the cut faces while hot and fill with crushed sugared strawberries, peaches or other fruit, with cream poured over.
"Short" in shortcake means shortened with fat, the same sense as shortbread and shortcrust, and in American use it came to mean this barely sweetened biscuit dough baked and split to hold fruit. Nineteenth-century cookbooks often treat it as a hot bread rather than a dessert cake, leavened at the last minute; chemical leavening had made such doughs a matter of minutes rather than hours of yeast rising. Strawberry shortcake is generally traced to the mid-1800s in the United States, when berries were a brief local season rather than a year-round import, and the caution against cutting the baked round with a knife turns up in other books of the period.