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Guava Shortcake
Make a sauce (as above), preferably with the uncooked fruit, and serve as for Strawberry Shortcake. (See also Introductory Recipes.)
This is a recipe by cross-reference: the whole of it depends on "a sauce (as above)" and on the shortcake method the book assumes you already know. Here is what has to be filled in.
- The sauceThe "sauce (as above)" is not given on this page; on the strawberry-shortcake model it would be ripe guava pulp crushed with sugar. Something on the order of 1 lb of peeled guava to 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, mashed and left to stand until the juice draws out, is a reasonable modern reading, not the book's instruction.
- Strain the seedsThis is the point that decides whether the dish is pleasant. Guava seeds are stony and do not soften; press the crushed pulp through a coarse sieve or food mill and discard them, keeping the juice and the soft flesh.
- Uncooked fruitThe instruction to prefer the raw fruit is sound. Guava loses its distinctive perfume quickly with heat and takes on a cooked, jammy note; raw pulp keeps the fragrance the shortcake is for.
- Choosing fruitUse guavas that yield to the thumb and smell strongly through the skin. Underripe fruit is astringent and no amount of sugar fixes it. Frozen guava pulp, sold in Latin and Asian markets, works when fresh fruit is hard green.
- Acid and sugarGuava is generally less acid than strawberry and can taste flat. A tablespoon of lime juice per pound of fruit brings it into balance; lime with guava is common in parts of the tropics, though the book calls for no such thing.
- The shortcake"Serve as for Strawberry Shortcake" most likely points to a rich baking-powder biscuit dough, split while warm, buttered, filled and topped with the fruit and its juice, rather than a sponge cake. The book's own shortcake directions are elsewhere; no baking temperature or time is given here.
- Assemble lateFill the biscuits at the table or within a few minutes of serving, or the juice soaks the bottom layer to paste.
- YieldThe original gives none. One pound of guava with a standard biscuit round would, by modern reckoning, serve about six.
Guava (Psidium guajava) is native to tropical America and was carried through the Caribbean and on to Asia and the Pacific early in the colonial period, where it naturalised so thoroughly that it is now a weed in parts of both. In English-language cookbooks it appeared for a long time almost solely as guava jelly and guava cheese or paste, imported from Cuba and the Bahamas and treated as a luxury preserve rather than a fresh fruit. Recipes like this one, which assume a cook has ripe guavas in hand and can treat them as casually as strawberries, come from a different world: one in which the fresh fruit was near enough to hand to be taken for granted. Slotting it into the strawberry shortcake formula is the standard move of such books: an unfamiliar fruit is introduced through a dish every reader already knows.