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Strawberry Shortcake
4 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 ounces butter 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 quart strawberries Milk Hull the berries, sweeten and mash them slightly with a spoon, and stand aside. Sift the salt and baking powder with the flour and cut in the butter; add sufficient milk to make a dough, stirring with a fork. Mix quickly, and put it at once in a greased baking pan, and bake in a quick oven thirty minutes. When done, cut the crust with a knife and pull open the cake. Spread it thickly with butter, and put in the berries, reserving some for the top. Put on the crust, cover the top with the remaining berries, dust with powdered sugar, and serve with whipped cream.
A biscuit-dough shortcake in the older American sense: one large cake, split by hand and filled, not a sponge and not a sweetened cookie base. The instructions leave the liquid and the sugar to the cook's judgment.
- Quick ovenConventionally rendered as roughly 400-425F. The high heat is what makes the baking powder lift a heavy, unsweetened dough; a moderate oven gives a dense, pale slab.
- Thirty minutes is for one thick cakeThe recipe makes a single cake in one greased pan, and half an hour at that heat suits it. If you split the dough into two thinner layers, start checking at 15 minutes.
- The milk is unmeasuredFour cups of flour will take somewhere near 1½ cups of milk, but add it in stages until the dough just holds together. It should be soft and slightly sticky rather than smooth — overworking it is the one thing that will ruin the texture.
- 2 ounces butterFour tablespoons, cut into the flour as for pastry. This is a lean dough by modern shortcake standards, which is why the split cake is buttered again before filling; do not skip that step.
- A quart of strawberriesAbout 1½ lb whole, or roughly 4 cups hulled. Mashing only slightly is deliberate — you want juice to soak the crumb but whole berries left for texture and for the top.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given for the berries. Two to four tablespoons of sugar stirred in and left to stand 20–30 minutes draws out the syrup; taste and adjust, since the cake itself contains no sugar at all.
- Pull, do not sliceScoring the crust with a knife and then tearing the cake open gives a rough interior that absorbs juice. A clean knife cut seals the surface and the berries sit on top instead of soaking in.
- Yield and timingThe quantities would serve about eight. Assemble within an hour of baking -- the cake is at its best warm, and the crumb goes soggy once the juice has been sitting in it.
Shortcake takes its name from "short" in the pastry sense: fat cut into flour so the crumb breaks rather than stretches, the same principle as shortbread and short crust. The strawberry version is thoroughly American and thoroughly nineteenth-century, appearing in household cookbooks well before the sponge-cake and store-bought-cup versions took over in the twentieth; the biscuit dough here, split and buttered like a hot roll, is the older form. Butter was in common use in nineteenth-century American baking, and shortcake in particular was usually shortened with it.