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Flour Mixtures: Quick Breads: Cake
STRAWBERRY SHORT CAKE 1 1/4 cups of pastry flour 1/4 cup of shortening 1/4 cup of potato flour or corn- Milk as needed starch Butter to spread the cake 4 level teaspoonfuls of baking 1 basket of strawberries powder 1 cup of granulated sugar 1/2 teaspoonful of salt Hull and wash the berries, cut them in halves and mix with the sugar; let stand in a warm but not hot place while the cake is baking. Prepare the ingredients as baking powder biscuit mixture, leaving it a little softer. Turn dough into a buttered pie plate, spread it evenly, drawing it away from the center somewhat. Let bake about twenty minutes. With a sharp pointed knife, cut the crust all around midway between the top and bottom, then gently pull it apart. Set one piece on a plate, spread with butter, pour on part of the prepared berries, set the other half of the crust above the berries, spread it with butter and then with the rest of the berries. Serve either with or without cream.
A biscuit-dough shortcake for a small household, baked in a single pie plate and split while hot. The original gives no oven temperature and no quantity of milk, so a little judgment is needed.
- Oven heatNone is stated. A dough of this kind wants a hot oven, in the region of 425F, for the twenty minutes given.
- Milk as neededExpect roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup for 1 1/2 cups of total dry ingredients. The instruction to leave it "a little softer" than biscuit dough means a batter you spread rather than pat, so err toward the wetter side.
- A basket of strawberriesBerry baskets of the period were commonly quart measures, something over a pound of fruit. A cup of sugar to that much fruit is generous by current taste; half will still draw plenty of juice.
- Baking powderFour level teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups of flour is a heavy hand today. Period powders varied in strength and many were single-acting; 2 to 3 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives the same lift without a metallic edge.
- Potato flour or cornstarchBoth are pure starch and are used here to soften the crumb by diluting the gluten. Cornstarch is the easy choice; potato starch, sold as such, behaves the same way. Neither is potato flour in the modern sense of dried whole potato, which absorbs far more liquid and is not a substitute here.
- ShorteningIn 1900 this meant lard, a lard-and-butter mixture, or one of the new vegetable compounds. Butter, cut in cold, gives the best flavour and browning.
- Splitting the cakeThe hinge of the method: cut and pull the cake apart as soon as it leaves the oven, as the recipe's sequence implies, so the crumb tears along its own seam and takes the butter.
- Warm but not hot placeProbably the back or warming shelf of the range. Letting the sugared berries stand at room temperature for the twenty minutes of baking answers the same purpose; refrigeration slows the juice and firms the fruit.
- YieldOne pie plate, size unspecified, serving two generously or three at a stretch.
Strawberry shortcake in the American sense is a biscuit, not a sponge and not the crisp sweet "shortcake" of British usage, and the split-and-buttered treatment here is the older form: a plain quick bread torn open hot, buttered like bread, and heaped with sugared fruit. Recipes of this shape appear steadily in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century, riding on the spread of chemical leavening, which made a tender cake possible in twenty minutes without yeast or a long beating. The potato flour or cornstarch is a characteristic touch of the era's domestic-science writers, who liked to adjust the proportion of starch to gluten deliberately rather than simply choosing a flour. That the recipe appears in a book called Cooking for Two is suggestive, if no more than that: shortcake was traditionally a large, communal, in-season dish, and scaling it into a single pie plate might be read as a turn toward small households rather than farm tables.