Apple Cake
The rule for Shortcake No. 2 4 or 5 sour apples 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon Pare and core and cut apples into eighths. Lay the pieces closely in rows the long way of the biscuit pan. Mix sugar and cinnamon and sift over the apples. Roll shortcake paste to exactly fit the pan, cover the apples and bake in a quick oven for thirty minutes. Serve with hard sauce or with cream.
A biscuit-dough cobbler baked lid-down over sliced apples, then turned out. Two things need translating before you start: the "rule for Shortcake No. 2" lives elsewhere in the book, and "quick oven" is hotter than most cobbler recipes today.
- The missing dough"The rule for Shortcake No. 2" means the shortcake paste from that recipe, not given here. Any rich baking-powder biscuit dough works: roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 3 to 4 tablespoons shortening or butter cut in, and about ¾ cup milk, mixed and handled lightly.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat the dough should set and brown in about the stated thirty minutes, which is also about long enough for apple eighths to soften. If the top colors before the fruit gives to a skewer, tent with foil rather than dropping the temperature.
- Sour applesTart cooking apples — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy, Baldwin. Modern dessert apples such as Gala or Red Delicious go flat and watery here, and the sugar is too sparing to carry them.
- Biscuit panA shallow rectangular pan, about 8x12 or 9x13 inches with sides an inch or two high. The apples want to lie in a single close layer, so choose the pan to fit the fruit rather than the reverse.
- SugarTwo tablespoons over four or five apples is barely a gloss; the recipe leans on the hard sauce for sweetness. If you are serving it with plain cream instead, 1/4 to 1/3 cup is closer to modern expectations.
- Roll to fit exactlyThe recipe is specific about this: cut or roll the dough to the pan's inside dimensions rather than draping it loosely, so it sits as a lid over the fruit. An overlapping edge invites the juice to boil up and over.
- ServingCut squares and lift them out. Hard sauce is creamed butter beaten with powdered sugar and a little vanilla or nutmeg, served cold against the hot cake. Six modest servings.
Gold Medal's cook book was promotional literature for Washburn-Crosby's flour, and its structure shows it: recipes cross-reference each other so that one master dough — Shortcake No. 2 — can be reused in a number of preparations, all of them selling flour. Calling this "apple cake" reflects older usage in which cake could mean anything baked flat in a pan, as in oatcake or griddle cake, rather than a creamed batter. The dish itself belongs to the wide American family of biscuit-topped fruit puddings that includes cobbler, sonker and the various "slumps" and "pandowdies" of New England; the same idea appears in nineteenth-century books under whichever name the author's region favored. Hard sauce, the recommended accompaniment, was the standard cold foil to a hot pudding in Anglo-American cooking well into the twentieth century, and its presence here places the dish at the end of a substantial dinner rather than at breakfast.