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Orange Shortcake
Make a sweet shortcake (see Introductory Recipes) and after baking, butter it, then pour over it thin-sliced oranges well sweetened. Serve with cream, whipped or plain.
This is an assembly instruction more than a full recipe: the shortcake itself is cross-referenced to the book's introductory pages, and the orange work happens while it bakes. Two things decide whether it succeeds — how long the oranges macerate, and getting the butter on while the cake is hot.
- The missing shortcake"Sweet shortcake" in American cookery of this period usually meant a biscuit-type dough — flour, baking powder, salt, a little sugar, butter cut in, milk to bind — rather than a sponge or the spongy supermarket cups; the book's own Introductory Recipes would give the actual formula. Any standard sweet biscuit shortcake baked in a single round works; the recipe specifies neither temperature nor time, but a hot oven of around 425F for roughly 15-20 minutes suits an 8-9 inch round.
- Split it, then butter itShortcakes of this type were often split horizontally while hot and buttered on the cut faces, though the recipe says only "after baking, butter it." Butter on a hot crumb slows the orange juice soaking straight through.
- Slicing the oranges"Thin-sliced" means cut in rounds across the segments, peel and pith removed. Modern practice is to cut away the peel and white pith with a knife rather than pulling it off, then slice about 1/4 inch thick and remove seeds; navels are seedless and easier.
- Sweetening and timingThe recipe says only "well sweetened" and gives no quantity or standing time; a few tablespoons of sugar per pound of slices, tossed and left to stand long enough to draw out juice, answers the instruction. Left very long the slices lose their shape and give up most of their juice.
- Cream"Plain" cream here means unwhipped pouring cream; heavy cream, thinned with a little milk if you want it looser, reads closest. For whipped, cold heavy cream taken to soft peaks. The recipe says nothing about sweetening the cream either way.
- Serve at onceThis does not hold well. Assemble as it goes to the table, or the buttered cake soaks through.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A single 8-9 inch round with about four oranges would serve roughly six.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookery was a savoury-adjacent quick bread put to sweet use — a rich baking-powder biscuit split, buttered and heaped with whatever fruit was in season, which is why strawberry shortcake became the famous version and everything else stayed a variation. Oranges are a natural candidate for the same treatment, and doing so has the practical advantage that citrus is at its best in winter, when no berry is.