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Strawberry Short Cake (No. 2)
4 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt ½ cup butter 1 egg 1 cup (large) milk Strawberries (hulled and cleaned).
Sift together the flour, cream of tartar, soda, sugar and salt. Rub the butter into the dry ingredients. Beat the egg and add the milk. Stir lightly and quickly into the prepared flour. Roll in two sheets ½ inch thick, laying one sheet on top of the other. Bake in a hot oven. While hot, separate layers and spread with chopped strawberries and sugar between layers and over top.
A biscuit-style shortcake leavened with cream of tartar and soda rather than commercial baking powder. It comes together in minutes, and the dough will punish overworking.
- Hot ovenBake at 425-450F. Two stacked half-inch sheets need roughly 12-18 minutes depending on the size you cut; they are done when the tops are pale gold and the sides look dry rather than damp.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one teaspoon soda is a homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to four teaspoons of the modern double-acting kind. It acts as soon as the milk hits it, so get the dough into the oven promptly.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian household flour. Ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute; four cups is about 1 lb 2 oz.
- A large cup of milkRead it as a generous cup, 9 fl oz or so, and add the last of it by feel: the dough should be soft and slightly sticky, not stiff.
- Rubbing in the butterKeep the butter cold and work only until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs with some flat flakes remaining. Those unmelted pieces are what make the layers flake apart.
- Separating the layersTwo sheets baked in contact will want to fuse. Some period shortcake recipes direct brushing the lower sheet with melted butter before laying the second on top, so a knife slid round the edge lifts them cleanly while hot; this recipe does not say so.
- The strawberriesChop and sugar them thirty minutes ahead so they give up their juice, and crush a portion so there is syrup to soak into the hot crumb. Sugar to taste; a quart of berries is about right for a full batch.
- Yield and servingFour cups of flour makes a large shortcake, enough for eight to ten. Assemble and serve at once, while the cake is still warm; it stales quickly and is not worth eating the next day.
Shortcake in the North American sense is a biscuit, not a sponge: "short" refers to fat cutting through the gluten, the same sense preserved in shortbread and shortening. The rolled-and-stacked method here, with the sheets parting cleanly after baking, is one older treatment, predating the sweetened sponge and whipped-cream version that became common in restaurants and later in supermarket bakeries. The leavening is also of its moment: cream of tartar with soda was the older household way of raising a quick dough, and it persisted in recipe books well after tinned baking powder was on every grocer's shelf. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, which explains the branded ingredient in the first line.