Rich Shortcake
2 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/3 cup butter 3/4 cup milk 1 egg Mix and sift dry ingredients three times. Rub in the butter, and milk and beaten egg. Bake in a round buttered pan. Bake 15 minutes. Split cake and spread with a sweetened fruit mixture. Add the same mixture to top and garnish with whipped cream.
A biscuit-dough shortcake of the older American type — rich, barely sweet, and meant to be split hot. The original omits an oven temperature, which is the one thing you need to supply.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Fifteen minutes for a single round cake implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425F suits a biscuit dough of this kind.
- Pan sizeThe recipe does not specify. An 8- or 9-inch round is the usual assumption; the smaller pan gives a thicker cake that splits more cleanly.
- Rubbing in the butterKeep the butter cold and work it in only until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. The visible flakes of fat are what make the cake tender enough to split by hand rather than cut.
- Sifting three timesRepeated sifting aerated the flour and distributed the baking powder through it. One pass through a sieve, or a thorough whisking, does the same job now.
- Liquid quantityThree-quarters cup milk plus a whole egg is a soft dough, not a batter. Add the liquid all at once and stir only until it comes together — extra mixing toughens it.
- Splitting the cakeSplit while still warm, and butter the cut faces before the fruit goes on. This keeps the juice from soaking the crumb to mush.
- The fruit"A sweetened fruit mixture" means berries crushed with sugar and left to stand 20–30 minutes until they give up their syrup. Strawberries are the likeliest intention; sugar to taste, roughly 1/4 cup per pint.
- YieldOne 8-inch round serves 6 as wedges. It is at its best within an hour of baking and does not keep.
Shortcake in the American sense is a sweetened biscuit, not a cake, and the split-and-filled strawberry version is often said to have been a fixture of summer suppers and church socials by the mid-nineteenth century. The word "short" refers to the fat that shortens the gluten strands he shshortening and shortening. Gold Medal's cookbooks were promotional publications from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, later General Mills, and the method here is a biscuit method: dry goods sifted, cold fat rubbed in, liquid added last. The sponge-cake and pound-cake versions of shortcake that appear in later grocery-store shells are a twentieth-century convenience; a book written to sell flour had every reason to keep the reader making the dough herself.