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Peach Short Cake
Make a rich baking powder crust and roll to inch thickness. Cut with cooky cutter, and butter ½ the resultant small cakes. Place the unbuttered ones on top.
Bake them, then split open and fill each one with fresh peaches cut in thin slices, and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Serve hot with whipped cream. Cream is nicer if flavored with almond extract and filled with chopped almonds. -Miss Rea Moon, Oakwood, Ont.
This is a biscuit shortcake, not a sponge or a sweet cake batter, and the buttered-face trick is the whole point of the method. Two details need translating: the dough and the missing oven temperature.
- The hinge: butter between the layersButtering one round and capping it with a plain one makes a single thick cake that pulls apart cleanly along the buttered seam after baking. Skip the butter and you will be tearing the cakes open with a fork.
- "Rich baking powder crust"This means biscuit dough enriched with extra fat, and often a little sugar and an egg — roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter, and milk to bind. It is not pie crust and it should be handled quickly and lightly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly coloured; a slower oven dries the crumb before it rises.
- "Cooky cutter"A plain round cutter of 2 to 2 1/2 inches. Cut straight down without twisting, and do not roll thinner than the specified inch — the stacked pair should end up close to two inches tall.
- "Powdered sugar"In cookbooks of this period the term often meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold now. Either works here for sprinkling over the fruit.
- The peachesPeel them (a brief dip in boiling water loosens the skins) and slice thin. The recipe sprinkles sugar over the fruit once the cakes are filled; sugaring 15 to 30 minutes ahead instead will draw out juice. Free-stone peaches at full ripeness are the easiest to slice thin.
- Almond extract quantityNone is given. A scant 1/4 teaspoon in a cup of cream is plenty; add it cautiously and taste.
- Yield and timingCut at the full inch thickness the recipe specifies, a two-cup flour dough gives only a handful of assembled shortcakes. They are meant to be eaten hot, within minutes of splitting — assembled and left standing, the biscuit goes sodden and the cream weeps.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its Five Roses flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who mailed in their own recipes — which is why this one carries the name and town of Miss Rea Moon of Oakwood, Ontario. Shortcake in the North American sense is usually taken to mean a split biscuit, and strawberry was its default partner; peach versions belonged to late summer, when fruit was cheap enough to pile on generously. The suggestion of almond extract and chopped almonds in the cream reflects a period habit of pairing stone fruit with almond flavour, the two being botanical cousins and the flavour compounds genuinely related.