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Cherry Short-Cake
Chop up, with a silver knife, after pitting them, some fine sweet cherries, and sift over the fruit a generous layer of sugar; set aside for an hour before making the short-cake, to form juice.
For the pastry make rich biscuit crust. Into 1 pint of sifted flour-2 cupfuls-mix a little salt and 2 level teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Sift again, and rub in a tablespoonful each of lard and butter. Add I well-beaten egg and enough milk to make a dough to roll out. Bake in a biscuit-pan in two layers half an inch thick; to keep them separate, place flecks of butter between. This requires a quick oven, as for biscuit. When done, cut the crust into individual pieces and spread the prepared cherries between and on top. Serve with whipped cream, flavored with the remainder of juice.
A straightforward baking-powder shortcake, written when "biscuit crust" needed no explanation. Two details carry the dish: the hour of maceration that draws juice from the cherries, and a genuinely hot oven so the layers rise rather than dry out.
- Quantity of cherriesThe original never says how many. For a two-layer cake of this size, figure about 1 1/2 lb sweet cherries (roughly 4 cups pitted) and 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, adjusted to their sweetness.
- The silver knifeCarbon-steel blades of the period reacted with fruit acid and left grey streaks on the cut surfaces. Stainless steel does the same job now; the instruction is obsolete rather than fussy.
- A quick oven425-450F. Shortcake layers half an inch thick will take about 12-15 minutes at that heat and should be pale gold, not browned through.
- A pint of flourThe recipe helpfully glosses this as 2 cupfuls, about 8 oz by weight. Sifting before measuring, as directed, gives a lighter cup than scooping.
- LardA tablespoon each of lard and butter gives tenderness plus flavour. All butter (2 tablespoons) works; the crumb is slightly less short. Note that this is a lean dough by modern shortcake standards.
- Flecks of butter between the layersThis is the hinge. The two rounds are baked stacked in one pan with butter between so they steam apart cleanly after baking. Skip the butter and you will tear them.
- Biscuit-panAny round cake tin or heavy baking sheet of about 8 inches.
- The whipped cream"Flavored with the remainder of juice" means folding a spoonful or two of the macerating syrup into softly whipped cream. Add it at the very end; too much liquid and the cream will not hold.
- YieldPerhaps six servings, cut into individual pieces while still warm. Assemble at the table, since the crust softens quickly under the fruit.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookery meant a biscuit dough enriched with fat, split and layered with sweetened raw fruit -- not the sweet spongecake sold under the name today. Strawberry was the famous version, but any soft summer fruit was fair game. The instruction to sugar the fruit an hour ahead is doing real work: the sugar draws out juice by osmosis, and that juice is then split between soaking the crust and flavouring the cream, so nothing is wasted.