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Eggless Shortcake
2-3 cup milk. 2 scant tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons sugar dissolved in milk. 4 level teaspoons baking powder. Flour to make soft dough. Roll out not too thin and bake in cake pan, not too hard. When cool and just before serving place sweetened berries between. Serve with whipped cream.
A plain baking-powder shortcake dough written in shorthand, as Mrs. Wilson often did. Two things need settling before you start: the milk quantity and the oven, neither of which the original states usefully.
- "2-3 cup milk"Almost certainly two-thirds of a cup, a fraction that lost its slash in typesetting. Two to three cups of milk would need a great deal more flour and butter to balance; 2/3 cup fits the two tablespoons of butter and roughly two cups of flour.
- Flour to make soft doughExpect about 2 cups of all-purpose flour, added a little at a time until the dough just holds together and is still tacky. A stiff dough gives a tough, bready shortcake; stop while it is softer than you think it should be.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Modern shortcakes of this type are usually baked hot, around 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until risen and pale gold; note that the original's "not too hard" may itself be a caution against too fierce an oven.
- Baking powderFour level teaspoons to two cups of flour is heavier than modern practice, which runs to about one to one and a half teaspoons per cup of flour. It works, but the leavening flavor is noticeable; three teaspoons is closer to current taste, and use a double-acting powder.
- Cut the butter inThe list gives no method. Rub or cut the cold butter into the flour before the sweetened milk goes in, as for biscuits. Two tablespoons is a lean amount of fat, so any butter left in visible flakes is worth having.
- "Roll out not too thin"About three-quarters of an inch. Bake it as one round in a cake pan, as directed, then split it horizontally once cool and fill it.
- The berriesSugar them and let them stand 30 minutes so they give up juice; the syrup is what soaks the crumb. Sliced strawberries are the default, but any soft summer fruit works.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch round, serving six. Assemble it just before serving as written, or the base goes sodden.
Mrs. Wilson wrote for households still living with the habits of the First World War, when wheat, sugar and fats were the main targets of conservation campaigns run through the U.S. Food Administration; her books are full of recipes that leave out one expensive ingredient and lean on baking powder to do the work instead. Eggless cakes and shortcakes were a standard part of that repertoire and outlived the shortage because they are cheap and quick. The dish itself is the older American strawberry shortcake, which is a sweetened biscuit rather than the sponge-cake cups sold in supermarkets today; that split biscuit form appears in American cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century, and Mrs. Wilson, who wrote from Philadelphia, gives it in its plainest version.