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Strawberry Shortcake
Make a plain Short Cake. See page 284. Bake in two round cake pans, about fifteen minutes in a hot oven. When slightly cool, split, and spread with butter. Allow no less than one quart of berries to a short cake the more the better. Crush all the berries except those to be used in decorating the top. Sweeten to taste. If berries are not very ripe, heat them slightly before crushing. Pour them over the first split half of short cake, cover with the other half, and continue in this way until it is four stories high. Decorate with whole berries and meringue, if desired. Serve with Creamy Sauce, or with sweetened, flavored cream.
A biscuit-style shortcake stacked four layers deep, from an era when "shortcake" meant a rich baking-powder dough rather than sponge cake. The page reference to the base dough is not reproduced here, so you will need a plain shortcake recipe of your own.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for a thin round of biscuit dough in a cake pan; a cooler oven gives a pale, tough cake.
- What "plain Short Cake" meansA short, rich baking-powder dough — roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter cut in, and enough milk to make a soft dough. It is not a sweetened sponge, and it is not the spongy cups sold in supermarkets.
- Split while warm, butter at onceSplit while slightly cool, butter at once -- The recipe splits the rounds when slightly cool and butters them then; they pull apart more cleanly before they are stone cold, and the butter is presumably there to keep the crumb from going sodden with juice.
- Four stories from two pansTwo baked rounds, each split, give the four layers. Bake the rounds thin — about 3/4 inch of dough in an 8- or 9-inch pan — or the finished stack is unmanageable.
- A quart of berriesRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb; allow a little extra so there are whole berries left for the top. Crushing rather than slicing is deliberate: the juice is the sauce.
- Heating underripe berriesWarming them briefly breaks down the flesh and draws out juice from fruit that has no perfume of its own. The recipe heats before crushing and sweetens separately. Do not cook them to jam; a few minutes over low heat is enough.
- Meringue, if you use itWhipped egg white with sugar spread on top needs a short spell in the oven — 8 to 10 minutes at 350F — to set and take colour. Given the buttered, juice-soaked layers underneath, sweetened whipped cream is the easier finish.
- Yield and timingProbably about 8 servings. Assemble within an hour or so of serving; a stack this tall will not hold its shape overnight.
American shortcake belongs to the biscuit tradition, not the cake tradition — "short" refers to the fat that shortens the gluten, the same sense as shortbread and shortcrust. Strawberry shortcake as a fixed summer institution dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when chemical leavening made a quick rich dough possible without yeast, and it was tied firmly to the few weeks of local strawberry season before refrigerated rail freight and California growing stretched the fruit across the year. The insistence here on "no less than one quart of berries — the more the better" and the four-story stack marks it as a celebration dish for a table with fruit to spare.