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Drop Biscuit or Scones
Where drop biscuit or scones are wished drop the dough by the spoonful (size desired) on to well greased paninstead of rolling out-while the dough is yet not in the smooth, harder condition required for rolling and cutting. SHORT-CAKE (Plain) To each pint of flour allow one dessertspoon of shortening (or one tablespoon if a richer dough is preferred), one dessertspoon of sugar, one heaping teaspoon baking powder, and a half teaspoon of salt. Roll out and bake in two sheets (either round or square tins), and bake about twenty minutes in a rather quick oven. Separate the sheets with a fork and pour or spread over them the prepared fruit. Or the dough may be rolled thinner, buttered, and folded over so that the sheets may be opened more readily. For further directions see Strawberry Shortcake.)
Two related formulas sit in one paragraph: a drop biscuit variation on a dough given earlier in the book, and a plain shortcake measured by the pint of flour. Both assume a cook who already knows the basic biscuit method.
- The missing liquidNeither instruction names a liquid or a quantity, because both lean on the rolled biscuit recipe printed before them. Expect to need roughly 2/3 to 3/4 cup of milk per pint of flour, added until the dough just holds together — for the drop version, stop while it is still slack and sticky, which is exactly the stage this text describes as "not in the smooth, harder condition required for rolling."
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in a pint cup: 2 cups, about 8 to 9 oz depending on how it was scooped. Everything else scales from that.
- DessertspoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. So the plain shortcake takes 2 teaspoons of fat and 2 teaspoons of sugar per pint of flour — a genuinely lean dough, closer to a biscuit than to the cake-like shortcakes sold now.
- Baking powderOne heaping teaspoon per pint reads light by modern practice; 2 teaspoons per 2 cups of flour gives a more reliable lift with today's single- or double-acting powders.
- A rather quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F; the book gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat suits two thin sheets in cake tins; drop biscuits, being smaller and looser, will be done sooner.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covers lard, butter or a vegetable compound. Butter gives the best flavour in so lean a dough; work it in cold and rub it to coarse crumbs rather than creaming it.
- Splitting the sheetsThe fork matters. Prying the hot layers apart along their natural seam leaves a rough, absorbent surface that takes up fruit juice; cutting with a knife compresses it and the juice runs off. The buttered-and-folded variant is simply insurance that the two halves separate cleanly.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither pan size nor yield; a pint of flour will make two modest sheets, or roughly ten drop biscuits. Assemble with the fruit shortly before serving, since so lean a dough soaks through quickly.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American books is a biscuit dough, not a sponge or a sweetened cake: "short" refers to the fat that shortens the gluten, and the sugar here is a token dessertspoon per pint. That is why the recipe reads as an introductory formula rather than a dessert in its own right — it is the neutral base that strawberries, peaches or stewed rhubarb are poured over, with the fruit and its juice doing much of the sweetening. The drop biscuit note preceding it suggests the same bowl of dough could be rolled and cut or else spooned straight onto a greased pan, though the text gives no reason for choosing one over the other; dropping it at a wetter stage is generally said to produce a lighter, craggier biscuit. The split-and-fill construction survives in American strawberry shortcake, though the base has tended toward sweeter, richer doughs than the one measured out here.