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Peach Shortcake
The same thing as strawberry shortcake, using chopped ripe peaches instead. It is a cake of short paste, not sweet, as large as a plate and thick as a biscuit, split in two after baking, peaches and sugar spread on the lower half, the other placed on top with the split side upward and more peaches spread upon that. It is eaten with cream. The ingredients required are: 1 cupful of lard or butter--8 ounces. 3 cupfuls of flour--12 ounces. 1/2 teaspoonful salt. 1 cup of ice water. 1 quart of cut peaches. 1 cupful of sugar.
Pare the peaches, cut them small and shake up with the sugar before making the paste, and set them in a cool place. Rub the butter into the flour thoroughly with the hands. Salt is needed only where lard is used. Make a hollow in the middle, pour in the water, mix up soft, roll out on the table in flour reserved for the purpose. It makes the cake flaky and part in layers to roll it and fold it a few times like pie paste.
Then make it up round, let stand five minutes, roll out thick as biscuit and bake on a jelly-cake pan. Finish with fruit as above stated.
A pie-paste shortcake rather than a biscuit one — there is no leavening at all, and the flakiness comes entirely from rolling and folding. Two things need attention before you start: the water quantity and the flour measure.
- The water is the hingeA full cup of ice water to 12 oz of flour is far more than pie paste normally takes, and a dough that wet will be tough and slack. Add it a few tablespoons at a time and stop as soon as the dough holds together; you may need only a third to half of it.
- Weigh the flourThe book's own equivalents give 4 oz to the cup, which suggests a soft, lightly scooped nineteenth-century flour. Modern all-purpose runs a little heavier per cup, so work from the weights: 12 oz flour, 8 oz fat.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake it as you would pie pastry — 425F — until the layers are set and lightly coloured, roughly 18 to 22 minutes for a cake the thickness of a biscuit.
- Jelly-cake panA shallow round layer-cake pan, 8 or 9 inches. The dough is baked as one thick round on the pan, not pressed into it like a crust.
- Lard or butterEither works. The note about salt reflects the fact that lard is unsalted while the butter assumed here was evidently salted; with modern unsalted butter, keep the half teaspoon of salt.
- Fruit quantityA quart of cut peaches is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 lb of fruit, four or five medium ones. Macerating them with the sugar ahead of time, as directed, is what produces the syrup that soaks the split cake.
- The cream is poured, not whippedThe cream -- The recipe says only that it is 'eaten with cream', which most likely means cold cream poured over at the table rather than anything whipped or sweetened.
- YieldOne plate-sized cake, split and stacked, serves four to six.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American usage meant a plain, unsweetened dough — short with fat, hence the name — split and filled with sweetened raw fruit, the sugar and juice doing all the sweetening. Strawberry was the canonical version, and cooks simply swapped in whatever soft fruit was in season, which is exactly the logic of this entry: it opens by telling you it is the strawberry recipe with peaches. What is unusual here is the choice of pie paste rather than a baking-powder biscuit dough; both were current, and the rolled-and-folded version belongs to a pastry cook's habits rather than a household baker's.