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Strawberry Short Cake
½ C butter or substitute ½ t salt 3 C pastry flour 1 egg, well beaten 3 t baking powder 1 C milk Sift flour, baking Powder and salt four times. Mix shortening in as for piecrust. Add milk, then the egg. Spread smoothly in well-greased pan, or make individual sized cakes. Bake about twenty minutes in hot oven. Split, butter, spread with fresh berries (or other fruit). Serve with sugar and plain or whipped cream.
A standard baking-powder shortcake dough, mixed like pastry rather than creamed like a cake. The instructions are sound; only the units and the oven need translating.
- The butter and salt quantitiesThe amounts printed for butter and salt have lost their fractions and read as "12 C" and "12 t", which cannot be right for three cups of flour. Comparable shortcakes of the period use about half a cup of fat and half a teaspoon of salt, but the original figures as given are not recoverable with certainty.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in books of this era is usually taken as roughly 400-450F, so 425F is a safe reading. Twenty minutes suits a single pan; individual cakes will likely be done sooner, in about 12 to 15 minutes.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute all-purpose, or replace two tablespoons per cup with cornstarch for a more tender crumb.
- Sifting four timesRepeated sifting was generally meant to break up soft flour that packed and clumped and to distribute the leavener through it. With modern flour and free-flowing baking powder, one thorough whisking in a bowl should do much the same work.
- Mix as for piecrustCut the cold fat in until the pieces are pea-sized and stop. Overworking at this stage, or after the milk goes in, gives a tough shortcake instead of a flaky one.
- Split and butter while hotSplit and butter -- Butter melting into the cut faces helps keep the crumb from going sodden under the berries. The recipe does not say when to split, but doing it as soon as the cakes can be handled makes this easier.
- The berriesCrush and sugar the hulled strawberries half an hour ahead so they release juice; the recipe gives no quantity, but about a quart suits this amount of dough. Sugar is served at the table, which may mean the fruit was not pre-sweetened.
- YieldThree cups of flour fills a 9-inch round or 8-inch square pan, serving six to eight, or makes about eight individual cakes.
Shortcake in American usage means a rich biscuit dough rather than a sponge cake, and "short" is generally understood to mean crumbly or friable, from the effect of fat on the dough. Recipes of this type spread widely once cheap chemical baking powder replaced the labor of yeast or beaten eggs in the later nineteenth century, which is why a book of this kind can assume both baking powder and a hot oven without comment. The parenthetical "or substitute" beside the butter is a small period marker: compound shortenings and oleomargarine were widely available by the time this book was compiled, and cooks were expected to use whichever fat they had. The instruction to make individual cakes suits serving a crowd as readily as one pan to be cut at the table.