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Short Cake
1 quart Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder ½ cup butter and lard 1¼ cups milk.
Sift together four times dry ingredients. Rub in butter and lard. Add milk. Bake in sheets in quick oven. Double the shortening if cake is wanted very crisp and short. Place fresh fruit between layers, and serve with sugar and cream.
This is a biscuit-dough shortcake, not a sponge — the whole point is a rich, flaky sheet split and filled with fruit. Two things decide whether it works: a hot oven and a light hand with the dough.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in a quart measure: 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb / 450 g of sifted all-purpose flour. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour, so plain bread flour is closer to the original than a soft cake flour, though all-purpose is fine.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400–450°F (200–230°C). A hot oven is what makes the layers lift and the outside crisp; at 350°F the same dough bakes pale and tough.
- Butter and lardHalf a cup total, split between the two — about 4 oz / 115 g. Lard gives the flakiness, butter the flavour. All butter works; all shortening gives a duller result. Doubling it to a full cup, as the recipe offers, produces a very short, almost pastry-like cake.
- Keep the fat cold"Rub in" means working cold fat into the flour until it is in pea-sized flakes, not creaming it. Warm fat smears into the flour and you lose the layers.
- Handle the dough as little as possibleAdd the milk all at once, bring the dough together in a few strokes, and pat it out rather than kneading or rolling repeatedly. Overworking a high-protein flour like this one makes the shortcake bready.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to four cups of flour is a standard modern ratio and needs no adjustment. Repeated sifting, as directed, helped distribute the leavening evenly through the flour; twice is ample now, or a good whisk in the bowl.
- Sheets, then splitBake in two greased sheet pans or one 9x13 pan, 12–18 minutes depending on thickness, until well browned. A single thicker sheet can be split horizontally while warm and buttered before filling.
- Yield and servingEnough for 8 to 10. Crush and sugar part of the fruit half an hour ahead so it gives up juice to soak the bottom layer; keep the rest whole for the top. Strawberries are the classic, but any soft fruit suits.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to purchasers of its flour — one of the great flour-company cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and a fixture in Canadian kitchens for decades. Its shortcake is the older North American kind: a rich baking-powder biscuit dough baked in sheets, split, and layered with fruit, rather than the sweetened sponge or the spongy supermarket cups that later took over the name. "Short" refers to the fat, which shortens the gluten strands and gives the crumb its crispness — hence the instruction to double the shortening if a very short cake is wanted. The pairing with fresh berries and cream reflects a seasonal habit rather than a fixed recipe; strawberry shortcake is generally traced to mid-nineteenth-century America, when berries came briefly and in quantity and had to be used.