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Shortbread or Shortcake
Make like baking powder biscuits, but increase fat to 4-5 tablespoons. Pat in rounds to fit pie pans, and bake as above. Split when done, butter while hot, and fill with well-sugared fresh or cooked fruit. Eat at once. Huckleberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, thimbleberries, and blackberries are the camp naturals. Sugar them, mash a few of the berries to make juice, and let stand 1-2 hours before starting your shortcake. 5 CUPS FLOUR
A camp shortcake built on the biscuit recipe that precedes it, with extra fat for tenderness. Everything hinges on the berries being sugared well ahead of time, since the juice is the sauce.
- Start the fruit firstThe one-to-two hour maceration is not optional padding. Sugar draws juice out of the berries and mashing a portion of them thickens that juice into syrup; without it you get dry biscuit and whole dry fruit.
- Oven heatThe recipe only says "bake as above," so follow the temperature and time given in the biscuit recipe it refers back to. A pie-pan round bakes longer than individual biscuits, so judge by a deep gold top and a dry centre rather than by the clock.
- The extra fatThe recipe simply raises the fat to 4-5 tablespoons over whatever the biscuit recipe calls for, and that extra fat is what separates shortcake from a split biscuit with fruit on it. Keep the fat cold and cut it in coarsely; overworking it makes the round tough and the split ragged.
- Splitting hotSplit the round with a fork rather than a knife, pulling it apart along its natural seam, and butter it while steaming. Butter melting into the crumb is what stops the fruit juice turning the base to paste.
- ThimbleberriesRubus parviflorus, a soft raspberry relative of the northern woods and the Great Lakes region. They collapse almost on picking and are rarely sold, so if foraging is not on the table, raspberries behave the same way in this dish.
- Timing the serving"Eat at once" is a real instruction. Assembled shortcake goes soggy in the bottom half quickly; bake the rounds first and fill them at the table.
- Cooking away from an ovenIf baking in a reflector oven or a covered Dutch oven, the round wants a bright bed of coals and turning partway through, since the heat is one-sided. Judge doneness by lifting an edge and checking the underside is set and browned.