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Calumet Strawberry Shortcake
Make dough as for Apple Cake, adding a heaping tablespoon of sugar to the baking powder and flour, if sweet shortcake is wanted. Divide into two parts, butter the dough and bake 15 to 20 minutes. Crush the strawberries and add sugar enough to make juicy before spreading between the layers, and on top of shortcake. Whipped cream sweetened and flavored to taste can be added. (See illustration, page 21.)
This is a promotional page from a baking-powder company, so it assumes you have already read the Apple Cake recipe a few pages earlier and that you own a hot oven. Both need filling in.
- The missing base recipe"Dough as for Apple Cake" means a rich baking-powder biscuit dough, not a batter. Doughs of this type in the Calumet books run to roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 2 to 4 tablespoons shortening and about ¾ cup milk; treat that as the shape of it rather than an exact transcription, since the original cross-reference is not on this page.
- "Butter the dough"The likely reading is that you pat out both rounds, brush the top of the lower one generously with softened butter, lay the second round on it and bake them as a single stacked cake; the butter keeps the layers from fusing, so after baking they lift apart cleanly and each has a soft, buttered inner face. The line is terse enough that baking the two rounds separately is also a possible reading.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A modern oven at 425F to 450F suits it; 15 to 20 minutes at that heat is right for a two-layer stack about an inch and a half thick.
- Handling the doughMix only until it comes together and pat rather than roll. Baking-powder doughs of this period were worked as little as possible, and overworking gives a tough, bready shortcake instead of a tender one.
- The strawberriesCrush about a quart with 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar and let them stand 30 minutes before assembling. "Sugar enough to make juicy" means enough to draw out syrup, which is what soaks into the cut faces of the cake.
- Serve it warmThe recipe implies immediate assembly and that is correct. A biscuit shortcake is at its best within an hour of baking; held overnight it dries and the fruit turns the crumb to paste.
- Whipped creamHeavy cream whipped with a little sugar and vanilla. Period cream was not ultra-pasteurized and whipped readily; if yours resists, chill the bowl and beaters.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size or serving count. On the reconstructed quantities above, roughly one round of 8 to 9 inches, cut into six to eight wedges.
Reliable Recipes was a giveaway cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which ran through many editions in the first decades of the twentieth century, and every page of it exists to sell tins of baking powder — hence the brand name attached to a dish nobody owned. The recipe is a good record of what American shortcake meant before the sponge cake and the supermarket dessert shell: a sweetened biscuit dough, divided into two parts before baking, with the layers buttered so they part cleanly and drink up the fruit syrup. Crushing the berries with sugar rather than slicing them is often said to be the older practice, and the reason for it is structural, since the juice is what turns a plain biscuit into a pudding. The argument between biscuit shortcake and cake shortcake was already old by 1900 and has never been settled; this book is firmly on the biscuit side.