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Banana Shortcake
Between the layers of a simple but sweetened biscuitdough pour, just before serving, the crushed pulp of six bananas into which has been stirred juice of one orange (or other slightly tart fruit), half a cup of sugar and the whipped white of an egg or cup of whipped cream.
This is a filling recipe more than a cake recipe — the biscuit dough is left entirely to the cook. A few things need pinning down before it will work.
- The dough it assumesThe recipe leaves the dough entirely to the cook and gives no oven heat or timing. A workable period-style shortcake dough is a rich biscuit: roughly 2 cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, 2 tbsp sugar, 5-6 tbsp butter cut in, and about ¾ cup milk, baked as two rounds at 425-450F for 12-15 minutes.
- Assemble at the last momentThe instruction "just before serving" is the hinge. Crushed banana browns within minutes and weeps liquid that turns the biscuit to paste; mash, fold and fill with the shortcake already split and waiting.
- The orange juice is doing workWhatever the compiler intended, acid slows the browning of the pulp. Lemon does the job better if you do not mind the sharper note; the original allows "other slightly tart fruit."
- SugarHalf a cup for that quantity of ripe banana is generous by current taste. Start with a quarter cup, taste, and add — ripeness varies enormously.
- Egg white or creamThe whipped white is uncooked and stays uncooked. If you want to use it, use pasteurized whites; otherwise take the cream option the recipe itself offers, which is both safer and sturdier under the top layer.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size or serving count; this quantity of filling will cover a shortcake for roughly six to eight. It does not keep — leftovers are grey by morning.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is a split sweet biscuit, not sponge, and it was assembled with whatever fruit the season offered — strawberries in June, peaches in August. The banana was the newcomer. Fast steamers and the Central American fruit trade brought bananas into ordinary American groceries in the last quarter of the 1800s, and cookbooks of the period begin working the fruit into fritters, ices, salads and, as here, the existing shortcake formula. That the compiler gives no dough recipe suggests the rest: shortcake was likely assumed knowledge, and the only thing worth writing down was what to put between the layers.