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Fancy Short Cake
Puff-paste makes the finest short cake. Bake the crust in two rounds and arrange them in layers, buttering each and covering thickly with fruit, sugar and a little cinnamon if liked. Over the top layer of fruit spread whipped cream or a meringue made of the whites of two eggs and two tablespoons of granulated sugar. If the meringue is used, brown slightly in the oven. Serve cold with cream.
TAHM-ЛИM
A short set of instructions that assumes you already have puff paste and know what to do with it. The hinge is assembly: pastry and juicy fruit should meet as late as possible.
- The pastryTwo rounds of puff paste, rolled about 1/4 inch thick and docked all over so they rise flat rather than doming. A sheet of all-butter frozen puff pastry cut into two 8-inch rounds does the job.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Puff paste wants a hot oven; in a modern range, around 425F for 15-20 minutes, until the layers are set and deep gold. Too cool an oven melts the butter out before the steam can lift the leaves, and the rounds come out greasy rather than flaky.
- "Short cake" here is not biscuitThe recipe opens by preferring puff paste over the sweetened biscuit dough most American shortcakes use. Expect something closer to a mille-feuille than to the split, crumbly cake most readers picture.
- The fruitUnspecified; strawberries, raspberries or peaches in season are all plausible. As a working quantity, about 1 quart of berries, hulled and sliced, sugared with 1/4 to 1/3 cup and left 20 minutes to draw juice; drain off some of the syrup or the bottom crust will collapse.
- Buttering the layersThe recipe says only to butter each round. Doing it while the pastry is still warm, as you would a hot biscuit, spreads it more easily and may give a little protection against the fruit juice as well as adding richness.
- The meringue proportionsTwo whites to two tablespoons sugar is a lean, soft meringue; modern meringue formulas commonly run nearer two tablespoons of sugar per white for stability. Beaten to soft peak and spread over the fruit, a meringue this lean is liable to weep fairly quickly.
- Browning itThe recipe says only to 'brown slightly in the oven'. Four to five minutes in a hot oven (about 425F) will colour the peaks without cooking the fruit beneath. Note that a meringue browned this briefly stays essentially raw inside; if that matters in your household, use the whipped cream option, which the recipe offers as an equal.
- Assembly and yieldBuild it no more than half an hour before serving; puff paste goes limp fast under wet fruit. Two 8-inch rounds cut into six wedges, with more cream passed at the table.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century America usually meant a rich baking-powder dough, split and filled with sugared berries, and strawberry shortcake was firmly a June institution by the time this book was compiled. What makes this version "fancy" is the substitution of puff paste for that homely dough, a move borrowed from the French pastry repertoire and one that signals a cook with time, cold butter and a cool marble slab. The entries are compressed throughout: they were written for a cook who already knew how to make puff paste and needed only the idea. The garbled characters at the end of the text appear to be an artifact of the scanning rather than part of the original instruction.