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Rich Strawberry Short Cake
2 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains nutmeg 1 egg 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup milk Mix dry ingredients and sift twice, work in shortening with tips of fingers, add egg well beaten, and milk. Bake same as Strawberry Short Cake II. Split cake and spread under layer with Cream Sauce II. Cover with strawberries which have been sprinkled with powdered sugar; again spread with sauce, and cover with upper layer.
A rich biscuit dough rather than a sponge cake, mixed like pastry and split while warm. The original assumes you have two other recipes from the same book at hand.
- OvenBaked "same as Strawberry Short Cake II," which is not given here. A dough of this richness bakes at 425F for 15-20 minutes in a round layer pan or as thick drop biscuits, until well risen and lightly browned.
- Cream Sauce IIAlso cross-referenced rather than printed, so its contents cannot be recovered from this page. Period dessert 'cream sauces' range from sweetened whipped cream to a creamed butter-and-sugar sauce thinned with cream. Plain whipped cream with a spoonful of sugar is a sensible substitute.
- Butter quantityOne-third cup is a scant 5 1/2 tablespoons, about 75 g. Keep it cold and rub it in only until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs; overworking makes the cake tough rather than flaky.
- Liquid is deliberately scantOne-third cup milk plus one egg gives a stiff dough, not a batter. Add a tablespoon more milk only if the flour will not come together, since modern flours absorb slightly differently from those of the period.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by current standards but not wrong for a shortcake meant to rise fast and split cleanly. Use fresh double-acting powder; period powders were single-acting, though how much of the generous quantity that accounts for is guesswork.
- SplittingSplit the cake while it is still warm, using the tines of a fork rather than a knife, so the crumb tears along its natural line instead of compressing.
- BerriesThe recipe simply sprinkles the strawberries with powdered sugar. Letting them stand 20-30 minutes first will draw out juice to soak the lower layer.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch layer, serving six, or six individual shortcakes. Assemble just before serving or the cake goes sodden.
Strawberry shortcake in the American sense is typically a split biscuit rather than a cake. The "rich" in the title appears to mark it against a plainer version printed nearby: more butter, an egg, and a grating of nutmeg, a common nineteenth-century sweet-spice accent for milk and cream dishes. Cookbooks of this era routinely cross-referenced numbered variants of the same dish.