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Peach Shortcake
Peel, cut in slices, and sweeten three cups of peaches. Add two tablespoons lemon juice, spread between layers of shortcake. Garnish top layer with peaches and beaten cream.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a full recipe: the shortcake itself is assumed to have been made from the biscuit-dough recipe printed nearby in the Bread chapter. Everything here depends on the fruit being macerated in advance and the cake being split while warm.
- The shortcake is not includedYou have to supply it: a rich baking-powder biscuit dough baked in two layers or split after baking. Any 2-cup-flour biscuit shortcake baked in an 8- or 9-inch round will do; sponge cake will collapse under the juice.
- Sweeten, then wait"Sweeten three cups of peaches" is left to taste, which is sensible with variable fruit: start with 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar for three cups of slices. The recipe sets no standing time, but letting the slices sit 20 to 30 minutes will draw out syrup.
- Lemon juice does real workThe two tablespoons will slow browning and sharpen the fruit; with flatter-tasting supermarket peaches the acid is if anything more useful, not less.
- PeelingDip the peaches 30 seconds in boiling water and into cold; the skins slip off. Freestone varieties are far less trouble than clingstones for slicing.
- "Beaten cream"Whipped heavy cream, unsweetened in the original — the fruit syrup supplies the sugar. If your cream is ultra-pasteurized it will take longer to whip; keep bowl and beaters cold and stop at soft peaks so it settles into the fruit rather than sitting on top.
- Split and butter the layers warmSplitting and buttering -- Many shortcake recipes of the period direct splitting the cake while hot and buttering the cut faces, which keeps the juice from turning the crumb to paste; this one says only to spread the fruit between the layers. Assemble close to serving.
- YieldThree cups of peaches and one round cake will serve about six, or four if cut in large wedges; the recipe states no yield.
Shortcake in American cookbooks of this era means a split, buttered biscuit, not the sweet spongy cups sold in supermarkets today, and peach shortcake belongs to the family of quick breads raised with baking powder. Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; entries like this one show it also had to work as a general household cookbook. The instruction to leave the sweetening unspecified reflects a period when fruit arrived at the kitchen door in wildly varying condition and cooks were expected to taste and judge rather than measure.