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Strawberry Shortcake
Hull, cut in pieces, and sweeten two boxes of strawberries. Let them stand several hours. Arrange between layers of shortcake and garnish top with whole strawberries and beaten and sweetened cream. Raspberry, Blackberry, and Pineapple may be made in a similar way.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have a shortcake from elsewhere in the book and concerns itself only with the fruit and the layering. A few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- "Two boxes" of strawberriesBerries were commonly sold in pint or quart boxes; if these are quart boxes it means roughly 2 quarts, on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 lb hulled. If your berries come in 1 lb plastic clamshells, use four or five.
- Sweetening and the long standNo sugar quantity is given; 1/3 to 1/2 cup per quart is the usual range, adjusted to the fruit. The several hours are the point of the recipe, not an idle wait: sugar draws out juice that turns syrupy and soaks into the cake.
- Shortcake means biscuit, not spongeAmerican shortcake of this period is a rich baking-powder dough, split while warm and buttered between the halves. If you substitute a sponge or a store-bought cup cake the juice will collapse it rather than soak in.
- "Beaten and sweetened cream"Heavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks with a spoonful or two of sugar. Modern ultra-pasteurised cream whips more slowly; a chilled bowl helps.
- Assemble lateJuice and cream both soften the cake within the hour. Split, fill and garnish just before it goes to the table, and keep the macerated fruit cold until then.
- The pineapple variationFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme; it is best known for keeping gelatin from setting and can turn dairy bitter, so avoid letting fresh pineapple stand in the cream. Cooked or canned pineapple has no active enzyme.
- YieldTwo quarts of berries will serve six to eight, depending on the size of the shortcake, which this page does not specify.
Strawberry shortcake was already a fixed American summer institution by the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907; nineteenth-century cookbooks and newspapers treat it as a June dish tied to the short local berry season, and church and grange "strawberry festivals" were built around it. The English sense of shortcake is generally described as a crisp sweetened biscuit, while the American version is often said to have settled on a rich baking-powder dough closer to a scone, split and buttered. The book itself was produced by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; it leans on cross-references, which is why the shortcake proper is elsewhere and only the filling is described here. The list of substitutions at the end, raspberry, blackberry, pineapple, reflects a period habit of treating a recipe as a template for whatever the season or the tin cupboard offered.