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Old-Fashioned Shortcake
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 3 tablespoons shortening 3/4 cup milk 1 quart berries Sift dry ingredients; cut in shortening; add milk to make soft dough; smooth out lightly. Bake in greased deep layer cake tin in hot oven 20 to 25 minutes. Split and spread between layers with crushed and sweetened berries or other fruit.
A plain baking-powder biscuit dough baked as a single deep round, then split — the American shortcake in its original form, not a sponge cake. A few of the instructions assume knowledge a 1920s cook took for granted.
- "Hot oven"Bake at 425–450°F. The high heat is what makes the baking powder lift fast and gives the crust that sets up the split; a moderate oven produces a dense, pale disc.
- Handle it as little as possible"Smooth out lightly" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Mix only until the dough holds together and pat it into the tin with your fingertips — kneading or rolling develops gluten and the shortcake turns tough and bready.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covered lard, butter or a vegetable shortening; the recipe does not specify which. Butter works and tastes better; keep it cold and cut it in until the pieces are pea-sized.
- The tinA "deep layer cake tin" is an 8- or 9-inch round pan with sides about 2 inches high. A standard 8-inch cake pan is right; the dough should sit roughly an inch deep.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour (2 teaspoons per cup) is more than modern recipes, which usually call for 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup; period powders were also generally weaker per spoonful. Two to three teaspoons gives plenty of lift without the metallic aftertaste.
- Splitting it hotSplit the round while it is still warm, running a fork around the edge rather than a knife, so the layers tear apart along their natural seam. Buttering the cut faces before the fruit goes on keeps them from going soggy.
- The berriesA quart is about 4 cups. Crush roughly half of them with sugar (start with 1/3 cup) and let them stand 20–30 minutes to draw out juice; keep the rest whole for the top.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch round, cutting into six wedges. Best eaten within a couple of hours of baking.
Shortcake in America began as this — a rich biscuit, "short" in the old baker's sense of being loaded with fat, split and layered with fruit. The sponge and angel-food versions sold in supermarkets are a later commercial convenience; nineteenth-century cookbooks commonly describe a leavened dough, though sponge-type shortcakes appear in period books as well, and printed strawberry shortcake recipes cluster around the middle of the century. Its appearance in a Royal Baking Powder pamphlet is no accident: such booklets are generally understood as part of an effort to persuade home cooks that chemical leavening could replace yeast and long rising in everyday baking, and a shortcake dough that goes from bowl to oven in minutes made the argument better than any advertisement.