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Strawberry Short-Cake
Bake a rich paste in pie-plates. Have six ready. In these spread stewed strawberries well sweetened; lay one upon another, six deep. In winter, use preserved or canned berries.-Mrs. II.
This is short-cake in the older sense: thin rounds of rich pastry stacked with cooked fruit between them, closer to a torte than to the split biscuit Americans now expect. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to make and roll a paste, so the gaps are worth filling.
- "Rich paste" means pastryIn this period a rich paste is a short pastry heavy in butter, sometimes with an egg yolk or a little sugar, rolled thin. It is not a baking-powder biscuit dough. Figure on roughly 1 lb flour to 3/4 lb butter for six thin rounds.
- Pie-plates as formsThe paste is baked in the plates, most likely laid flat rather than lined in, so that each round comes out as a crisp disc the size of whatever plate is used (period pie-plates commonly ran 8 to 9 inches). Prick the paste all over or it will dome and the stack will not sit level.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Pastry rounds this thin want a hot oven, 400 to 425F, for 10 to 15 minutes, until pale gold and dry through. Underbaked layers turn to paste once the fruit goes on.
- Stewed strawberriesCook hulled berries with sugar to taste until they slump and the juice thickens slightly, then cool. Strawberries throw a great deal of water; a thin filling will dissolve the layers within the hour.
- Assemble lateThis is the hinge. The cake is only good if the paste is still crisp, so build it shortly before serving, an hour at most. Anything longer and it becomes a soft pudding, which is not what the layering is for.
- Canned or preserved fruitThe winter instruction most likely points to home-put-up berries or preserves in a heavy syrup, though commercially canned fruit was also available by this date. Modern canned or frozen strawberries carry more liquid and often less sugar, so drain them well and reduce the syrup before spreading.
- YieldSix stacked rounds make a tall cake that will serve a table of eight to twelve, depending on the size of the plates used. Cut it with a long serrated knife in a sawing motion, or the layers slide apart.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, catches short-cake at a moment when the word still covered two different things. The older English sense, carried into American kitchens, meant a rich short pastry, and recipes like this one stack it in thin layers with sweetened fruit between, much as a Southern jam cake or a European torte is built. The biscuit-dough version, split and buttered while hot, was gaining ground in the same decades and eventually took the name over entirely. The instruction to fall back on preserved or canned berries in winter is a reminder of how short the fresh strawberry season was before refrigerated freight: home canning in glass jars had become practical for ordinary households by the 1870s, and a contributor could assume her reader had a shelf of them. Attributions like "Mrs. H." run all through the book, which was assembled as a collective effort rather than authored by one hand.