Shortcake
3 teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons lard 1 cup milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients. Add butter and lard and chop until thoroughly blended. Add milk. When thoroughly mixed, divide in halves; put each half into a round, buttered cake tin. Flour hand and pat to fit the tin. Bake ten to twelve minutes in hot oven. Separate the upper portions from the lower portions of each cake with a fork - never cut with a knife. Spread with butter, fill with filling, and arrange in layers, with filling between.
A biscuit-style shortcake, baked as two thin rounds rather than one thick cake. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so read the notes before you start.
- Missing flour and saltThe list gives leavening, fats and milk but no flour or salt, which have dropped out of the transcription. A dough of this ratio conventionally takes about 2 cups of flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt; anything else is guesswork on our part rather than the book's.
- "Hot oven"Conventionally read as roughly 425-450F; the book gives no figure. Thin biscuit rounds want high heat so they rise fast and set before the fat renders out, and ten to twelve minutes is consistent with that.
- Butter and lard togetherThe lard gives tenderness and the butter gives flavour. Modern shortening or all butter works, but keep the total fat at 6 tablespoons and keep it cold. Note that the book itself says to chop until "thoroughly blended", not to stop at pea-sized pieces.
- PansTwo round cake tins, buttered; the book gives no size, so 8-inch is our choice rather than the book's. Patting with a floured hand rather than rolling keeps handling to a minimum and the crumb short.
- Fork, not knifeThis is the instruction that matters. Splitting the hot cakes with a fork tears along the natural layers and leaves a rough surface that soaks up juice; a knife smears the crumb and gives you a slick, sealed face.
- The fillingNone is specified; the recipe says only "fill with filling". Crushed sweetened fruit, most often strawberries, is the usual filling for shortcake of this period. A quart of berries, hulled, sliced and sugared and left to stand until they give up juice, would suit, but this is our suggestion, not the book's.
- Assembly and yieldThe butter on the cut faces is in the recipe, and is generally said to keep the crumb from going sodden under the juice. Two rounds split and layered serve roughly six to eight, and shortcake of this type is best eaten soon after assembly.
Lowney's book, published by a Boston chocolate firm around the turn of the twentieth century, gives a shortcake of the biscuit type: American shortcake of this period is a rich biscuit dough, chemically leavened, not the sweet sponge or the crumbly British short pastry that shares the name. Chemical leavening made such a cake quick to mix and bake, and shortcake was closely associated with the strawberry season. The instruction to split with a fork rather than a knife appears in other American cookbooks of the period, and reflects a conviction that a torn surface takes up juice better than a cut one.