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Apple Shortcake
Use mellow apples of fine flavor and make the same as peach shortcake, the apples not to be cooked, but mixed with sugar and chopped and used immediately.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have the peach shortcake entry in front of you: split, buttered biscuit-style layers with fruit between and on top. What is specific here is that the apples go in raw, chopped and sugared at the last moment.
- The hinge: use it immediatelyChopped raw apple browns within minutes and begins to weep sugar syrup, going grey and slack. Cut and sugar the apples only when the baked layers are out of the oven and ready to be split, and assemble at once.
- What "mellow" meansA ripe, soft-fleshed, sweet apple rather than a hard cider or keeping apple. McIntosh, Gravenstein, Cortland or a ripe Golden Delicious behave the way this recipe wants; Granny Smith and Braeburn stay crunchy and taste raw against the biscuit.
- Chop, do not sliceThe recipe says only 'chopped'; a small dice, on the order of a quarter-inch, keeps the fruit as a layer instead of sliding out when the cake is cut. Peeling is optional, though skins on a firm apple read as tough beside the soft crumb.
- Sugar quantityThe original gives none. About 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar per pound of chopped apple is enough to draw a little juice without making syrup; a squeeze of lemon slows browning and sharpens a flat apple.
- The shortcake itselfA nineteenth-century American shortcake is generally a rich chemically-leavened biscuit dough, not a sponge, baked as two rounds or one round split hot and buttered. The original gives no oven instruction here; in a modern oven such a dough bakes at around 425F for 15 to 20 minutes.
- Serve warm, eat the same hourServe warm, eat soon -- The layers should be warm and the fruit cold and just mixed. Assembled shortcake does not hold well: the biscuit soaks and softens quickly. The original's insistence on immediacy is directed at the chopped, sugared apples themselves.
- YieldThe original gives neither yield nor quantity. A shortcake round of the usual domestic size will take roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of apples once peeled and cored.
Shortcake in American usage means a rich biscuit dough shortened with butter or lard, split while hot and layered with fruit, and by the 1890s the strawberry version was the dominant one. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant pastry departments, which may explain the telegraphic style here: the peach shortcake entry carries the method, and the entries after it can be read as substitution notes for other fruit. Raw apple shortcake plausibly belongs to the later end of that sequence, when soft eating apples were cheap and plentiful and the kitchen wanted a fruit course that needed no stove time. The insistence that the apples not be cooked is deliberate, distinguishing the dish from apple pie and from the stewed-apple puddings that filled the same slot on a winter menu.