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Fruit Short Cake
1/4 cup butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1/4 cup milk 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten. Mix and sift flour, baking powder, and salt, adding alternately with milk to first mixture. Beat thoroughly, and bake in a buttered round tin. Cool, spread thickly with sweetened fruit, and cover with Cream Sauce I or II. Fresh strawberries, peaches, apricots, raspberries, or canned quince or pineapple may be used. When canned goods are used, drain fruit from syrup and cut in pieces. Dilute cream for Cream Sauce with fruit syrup in place of milk. Any shortcake mixture may be made for individual service by shaping with a large biscuit cutter; or mixture may be baked in a shallow cake pan, centre removed and filled with fruit, and pieces baked separately to introduce to represent handles.
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This is a cake-style shortcake rather than the biscuit type — creamed butter and sugar with egg, leavened with baking powder — split or spread and covered with fruit and a cream sauce.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only "bake in a buttered round tin." A moderate oven, around 375F, suits a thin butter cake; expect roughly 20 to 25 minutes for a single 8-inch layer and less for individual rounds.
- The pan"a buttered round tin" is unspecified; a shallow layer-cake pan of 8 or 9 inches is the likely intention. Butter it well, and lining the base with parchment does no harm.
- ProportionsThe quantities of butter, sugar and egg have not survived in this text alongside the 1/4 cup milk and 1 cup flour. A standard one-egg cake of that era used about 1/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup sugar to a cup of flour; treat that as a reconstruction rather than the book's own figure.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is heavy by current standards. About one and a half teaspoons of modern double-acting powder will lift this batter and is less likely to leave an aftertaste.
- Cream Sauce I or IIThese are separate recipes elsewhere in the same book and are not reproduced here; both are poured over rather than whipped. Lightly sweetened pouring cream is a serviceable modern substitute, and the instruction to thin it with the drained fruit syrup is worth keeping.
- Canned fruitDrain thoroughly and cut into pieces, as directed, or the syrup soaks the crumb. Canned quince has largely vanished from shops; poached fresh quince or firm pears behave similarly.
- YieldOne cup of flour should make a single small layer for about four, or roughly four to five individual rounds cut with a large biscuit cutter.
- The handle trickThe final suggestion — baking in a shallow pan, removing the centre, and baking extra pieces to set in as handles — produces a basket shape for the table. It is decorative only and adds nothing to the eating.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookery split into two camps, and this book prints both: a rich biscuit dough rolled and split, and a creamed butter cake like this one. Strawberry shortcake was already the fixed summer form by the 1890s, but the list here — peaches, apricots, raspberries, canned quince or pineapple — shows how the dish worked as a frame for whatever fruit the season or the pantry offered. The direction to dilute the cream sauce with drained canning syrup is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School's habits: nothing edible was thrown out, and a flavoured liquid was always preferred to plain milk. Canned pineapple and quince, both common shelf goods then, put fruit shortcake on the winter table as well as the summer one.