Apple Cakes
Make dough as for Standard Biscuit, only use more shortening. Roll out flat, about ½ inch thick, and cover the bottom of the pan. Spread with good butter and sprinkle with sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon, or whatever spice desired. Slice apples thin and lay on dough. Bake in pans, same as biscuit. 4 cups of sifted pastry flour
A biscuit-dough apple slab, closer to a rustic shortcake than a pie. The recipe assumes you have already read the book's Standard Biscuit entry, so most of what a modern cook needs is the missing detail from that page.
- The doughStandard biscuit dough of this era is flour, salt, baking powder, shortening cut in, and enough milk to make a soft dough. The recipe gives no quantity for the shortening; "more shortening" simply means a richer, more tender base than the plain biscuit, one less likely to toughen under the wet fruit. Without the book's Standard Biscuit page to hand you will have to judge it against your own biscuit proportions.
- The stray flour lineThe "4 cups of sifted pastry flour" printed at the end is the quantity for the dough, not an addition to the topping. Pastry flour is lower in protein than modern all-purpose; a mix of 3 1/2 cups all-purpose plus 1/2 cup cornstarch, or a soft Southern-style flour, tracks it closely.
- Oven heat"Same as biscuit" points to a hot, quick oven rather than a slow one. Period books rarely gave numbers; modern biscuit practice of roughly 425-450F is the usual equivalent, and a cooler oven risks the dough setting slowly and absorbing apple juice.
- Butter under the sugarThe butter is spread on the raw dough before the sugar and spice. As well as flavouring it, a soft spreadable layer may help keep the apple juice from soaking straight into the crumb, so it is worth not skipping.
- ApplesSlice no thicker than 1/8 inch. Biscuit dough bakes through in 15-25 minutes for a slab this size, which is not long enough to soften thick slices. A firm tart apple such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy holds its shape; softer eating apples collapse into sauce.
- Pan and thicknessThe recipe says "pans," plural, and dough from 4 cups of flour rolled to 1/2 inch will cover more than one 9x13; divide it between pans rather than forcing it into one. Press the dough up a slight lip at the edges to hold the juices.
- Doneness and yieldLook for a browned, dry base at the edge and apples that give to a knife tip, about 20-25 minutes. Cut into squares; the pan serves 8 to 12. Best warm on the day it is baked, since the dough stales quickly.
Apple cake in this sense has nothing to do with a creamed butter cake; it belongs to the older family of dough-and-fruit bakes that includes English apple pasties, German Apfelkuchen and the American apple slump and cobbler, in which a bread or biscuit dough carries fruit rather than a pastry shell enclosing it. Community and "reliable recipe" books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were built on cross-references like this one: a single Standard Biscuit dough underpinned shortcake, dumplings, cobbler tops and pages of fruit cakes, so the compiler saw no reason to repeat it. The dough is buttered and dusted with sugar and warm spice before the fruit goes on, spreading a little butter and a little nutmeg across a large pan.