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Boston Short Cake
4 cups Five Roses flour 4 teaspoons baking powder Shortening enough to make better than pie paste 1 handful granulated sugar 1 egg (well beaten in cup) Fill balance of cup with sweet milk or cream.
Roll crust and spread with desired filling. Roll up and slice about 1 inch thick and bake.
This is a contributed recipe written in shorthand for a cook who already knew what biscuit dough should feel like, and it leaves out both quantities and the oven. The result is a rolled, filled, sliced pinwheel biscuit rather than anything a modern reader would call a cake.
- What you are actually makingThe dough is rich baking-powder biscuit; rolled out, spread with filling, rolled up like a jelly roll and cut across into rounds. Set the slices cut-side up on a baking sheet, close but not touching, so they rise into each other.
- "Shortening enough to make better than pie paste"This means more fat than a pie crust. Pie pastry of the period commonly ran somewhere around a third the weight of the flour, so for 4 cups of flour figure at least a cup of lard, butter or vegetable shortening, cut in until the mixture looks like coarse meal.
- A handful of sugarGenuinely imprecise. A cook's handful of granulated sugar is roughly 1/4 cup, which gives a lightly sweetened dough that will not compete with the filling.
- The liquid is under-measuredOne egg beaten in a cup and topped with milk gives a single cup of liquid, which will not bring 4 cups of flour together. Expect to need 1 1/2 cups or more in total; add milk a little at a time until the dough just coheres.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified because sour milk was the ordinary alternative in these books and would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- SaltNot mentioned in the recipe. Add about 1 teaspoon with the flour and baking powder.
- Oven and timeBake at 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are browned and the exposed spirals are set. A slower oven lets the fat run out before the crumb sets.
- Filling"Desired filling" is left open; jam, sweetened crushed berries, brown sugar and butter, or cinnamon sugar all suit. Keep it thick; anything watery will soak the spiral and steam the centre.
- YieldAbout 18 slices at an inch thick. Best eaten the day they are made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and much of it was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why entries like this one read as a note to oneself rather than a set of instructions. "Short" cake refers to shortening: a dough made tender, or short, by a high proportion of fat, the same sense that gives us shortbread and shortcrust. The Boston attached to it is loose in this period, and no particular Boston connection is documented for this version. The pinwheel treatment of biscuit dough with a sweet filling survives in the same form as the cinnamon roll.