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Cranberry Shortcake
Make as for Strawberry Shortcake, using recipe for Sauce given above, and serving with a meringue.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have the shortcake and the cranberry sauce already in hand from earlier pages. What follows fills in what the original leaves unsaid.
- What the shortcake actually isThe Strawberry Shortcake being referred to is not reproduced here, so its dough is unknown; most American shortcakes of the period were a rich baking-powder biscuit rather than a sponge, though cake-batter versions do appear. A workable modern stand-in would be roughly 2 cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 4-6 tbsp butter rubbed in, and about 3/4 cup milk, baked in a round, split hot, buttered, and filled.
- Oven heatThe original gives no oven direction. A thick biscuit round of this kind is usually baked hot, around 425-450F for 15-20 minutes; a slacker oven risks drying it before the inside sets.
- The cranberry sauce"Sauce given above" means a cooked cranberry sauce. A typical period proportion is about a pound of berries to a cup or so of water, boiled until the skins pop, then sweetened generously — recipes of this kind commonly call for anywhere from three-quarters to the berries' own weight in sugar. Let it cool and thicken before it goes near the split cake, or it will soak the crumb to paste.
- Whole berry, not jellyStrained jellied sauce slides off the biscuit. Leave the berries whole or only lightly crushed so the filling has body between the layers.
- The meringueThe original says only "serving with a meringue", which may mean a topping browned on the cake or a meringue served alongside. For a baked-on topping, two egg whites beaten stiff with 4 tbsp sugar, spread over the top and set in a 325-350F oven for 12-15 minutes until the peaks are pale gold. Add the sugar gradually once the whites hold soft peaks or the meringue weeps.
- Assembly orderSplit and fill while the cake is warm. If you are browning the meringue on the cake rather than serving it separately, let the assembled shortcake cool a little first, or steam from the fruit will lift the topping away.
- YieldMade in a round of about 8 inches, it will serve six or so. It does not keep — the biscuit goes soggy and the meringue slumps within a few hours.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century America generally meant a biscuit rather than a cake: "short" refers to the fat that shortens the gluten, the same sense as shortbread and shortcrust. Strawberry was the usual version and other fruits were treated as variations on it, which is how this entry is written — as an instruction to substitute. Cranberries suited such a substitution out of the strawberry season, being a late-autumn crop that keeps for months in a cold cellar, and cultivated bogs on Cape Cod and in New Jersey were supplying the market by the later nineteenth century. The meringue implies a household with a reliable oven and egg whites to spare: it sweetens a fruit that is otherwise punishingly sour and dresses up a plain biscuit.