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Huckleberry or Blueberry Float
1 cup berries 3 tablespoons sugar 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon shortening 1/2 cup milk Pick over and wash berries; put into small saucepan with half cup of water, and bring quickly to a boil; add sugar and boil 5 minutes. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; add shortening and rub in very lightly; add milk slowly. Take a teaspoonful at a time in floured hands and roll into balls. Place on floured pie tin; brush with cold milk and bake about 12 minutes in hot oven. While warm break in half; butter each biscuit; put into dish and pour berries over. Serve at once with hard sauce.
A berry shortcake in miniature: soft baking-powder dough baked as small balls, split, buttered, and drowned in hot berry syrup. Nothing here is difficult, but two things in the original text will read oddly to a modern cook — the leavening ratio and the oven description.
- Oven heat"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the small dough balls should be through in the 12 minutes given; in a cooler oven they risk drying out before they colour.
- The baking powderRoyal was a tartrate (cream of tartar) powder, fast-acting rather than double-acting, so its lift came all at once in the mixing bowl. Two teaspoons to one cup of flour is well above the modern rate of about a teaspoon per cup; with today's double-acting powder 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons is enough, and less is likely to avoid any chemical aftertaste.
- One teaspoon of shorteningThat is not a typo. This is a very lean dough, closer to a dumpling than a shortcake, which is why the recipe butters the split halves afterwards. Butter or lard both work for the teaspoon.
- Handling the doughHalf a cup of milk to a cup of flour gives a wet, sticky dough — hence the floured hands and floured tin. Work fast and lightly; over-rolling makes the balls tough.
- Hard sauceAn uncooked sauce of creamed butter and powdered sugar, usually with a little vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled until firm. The book assumes the reader knows it; it is not a cooked custard.
- The berriesOne cup of berries with half a cup of water and three tablespoons of sugar makes a thin, bright syrup rather than a jam. The five minutes at a boil given is enough; longer and the fruit breaks down.
- YieldA cup of flour taken up a teaspoonful at a time makes a good many small biscuits; enough for three or four servings. Assemble at the table: the biscuits soften quickly once the syrup hits them, which is why the original says to serve at once.
A "float" in American home cookery of this era is generally understood to mean a dish where something solid sits in a pool of liquid — fruit juice, syrup or cream — rather than the ice-cream-and-soda drink the word later came to mean. Huckleberries and blueberries were used interchangeably in print, though they are different plants: the huckleberry has larger, harder seeds and was more often gathered wild, while cultivated blueberry breeding did not begin in earnest until the 1910s. These promotional cookbooks were assembled loosely — Royal Baking Powder published them to demonstrate every possible use for the tin, and the chapters group by loose family rather than strict logic.