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Short Cake
Mrs. Smock. 2 C flour ½ t salt 2 T sugar Combine and bake 4 t baking powder 3 T shortening 1/2 C milk
A bare-bones baking powder shortcake of the kind church cookbooks printed by the dozen, with the ingredient list set in two columns and almost no method. Everything you need to know is in the ratio: 2 cups flour to 3 tablespoons fat and half a cup of milk, which gives a stiff, biscuit-style dough rather than a batter.
- The saltThe salt quantity as printed is out of range for 2 cups of flour. A half teaspoon is the usual figure in shortcakes of this ratio; anything approaching a tablespoon would be inedible.
- Method, filled inWhisk the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder, cut in the shortening to a coarse crumb, then stir in the milk just until the dough holds together. Overworking it at this stage is what turns shortcake tough.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. A hot oven, in the region of 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, suits this kind of dough: hot enough to set the crust before the baking powder is spent.
- ShorteningIn community cookbooks of this kind the word usually means a solid vegetable shortening such as Crisco or a store brand, though lard or butter were also sold and used under the same name. Butter gives more flavour; lard tends to give a flakier crumb.
- MilkHalf a cup is on the dry side by modern habit. Hold back a tablespoon or two, then add more only if the dough will not come together in a shaggy mass.
- ShapingEither pat to about three-quarters of an inch and cut rounds, or bake as two thin layers in a pan and split them. The baked-and-split form is the one long associated with strawberry shortcake.
- YieldAbout six individual cakes, or one 8-inch round split into two layers. Serve the day it is baked, warm, with sweetened fruit and cream.
American shortcake has nothing to do with the sponge cake sold under that name in supermarkets; it is a sweetened biscuit dough, and "short" is the older word for crumbly, from which "shortening" derives. Recipes like this one belong to the era when chemical leavening had made such doughs a fifteen-minute job, and the cake existed chiefly as a vehicle for strawberries in June. Its appearance in a community collection under a contributor's name is typical of the genre, where a cook writing for her neighbors might see no reason to spell out an oven temperature or a mixing method.