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Saratoga Shortcake
Drain the juice from canned strawberries into a quart measure. To a quart allow 12 ounces of sugar and set it at the back of the range to simmer down as thick as fruit jelly. Then put in the strawberries and cook a short time longer. Roll out two thin sheets of ordinary flaky pie paste and bake them on two baking pans of the same size. When done spread the strawberry compote on one sheet, place the other sheet on top--moving it by means of two palette knives slipped under--and over the top of that spread a coat of thin cake icing. Dry the icing in a slack oven and let it acquire a little pale color. Cut in squares or diamonds when cold.
A pastry-shop assembly rather than a home baker's shortcake: two flat sheets of pie paste sandwiching a cooked-down strawberry compote, glazed and cut into portions. The hinge is reducing the syrup far enough that it does not soak the bottom sheet.
- The syrup reductionDrain the juice from the canned berries into a quart measure, allow 12 ounces of sugar to the quart, and simmer until it is as thick as fruit jelly — it should set on a cold plate. Underreducing is the usual failure: a loose compote soaks the bottom sheet.
- Weights, not cups12 ounces of sugar is a weight, about 1 3/4 cups granulated. Bakery books of this period assume a scale, and sugar measured by volume will throw the set off.
- "Back of the range"On a coal range the rear was the coolest zone, used for long unattended simmering. On a gas or electric hob this is your lowest setting, stirring now and then as it thickens and grows more prone to scorching.
- "A slack oven"Slack means barely warm — somewhere in the region of 250-300F, at the bottom of what a modern oven will hold steady. It is there only to dry the icing to a firm, faintly cream-colored skin, not to bake anything.
- Baking the sheets flatRoll the paste thin, dock it all over with a fork, and bake in a hot oven until crisp and evenly browned, weighting it with a second pan if it lifts. Two sheets of equal size on identical pans makes the transfer possible.
- Thin cake icingThis is a simple water icing: confectioners' sugar loosened with water or a little egg white to a pourable coating consistency, not buttercream. It should be spreadable with an offset spatula and self-level slightly.
- Moving the top sheetTwo long palette knives slipped under the baked sheet act as rails. A pair of thin metal spatulas or a large tart-pan base will do the same; a bare sheet of thin baked paste snaps if lifted from one side.
- Yield and cuttingCut only when fully cold, as the recipe directs, with a long thin knife pressed straight down rather than drawn, or the top shatters.
- Timing to serveBest soon after assembly; the reduced compote and the coat of icing both slow the crust from softening, but it will soften eventually.
Saratoga Springs, New York, lent its name to a long list of fashionable resort foods in the late nineteenth century — Saratoga chips being the survivor. This is a bakery shortcake in the trade sense, meaning a short (fat-rich) pastry rather than the biscuit-and-cream dessert the word usually calls up in America now. Its reliance on canned strawberries is the telling detail: by the time The American Pastry Cook appeared, commercially canned fruit in heavy syrup was cheap, uniform and available year-round. The recipe finishes by cutting squares or diamonds from a full sheet.