Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › Rich Strawberry Short Cake
Rich Strawberry Short Cake
2 cups flour Few grains nutmeg 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix dry ingredients and sift twice, work in shortening with tips of fingers, add egg well beaten, and milk. Bake same as Strawberry Short Cake II. Split cake and spread under layer with Cream Sauce II. Cover with strawberries which have been sprinkled with powdered sugar; again spread with sauce, and cover with upper layer.
A rich baking-powder shortcake dough, closer to a sweet biscuit than a cake, finished with berries and a creamed butter sauce. The trailing three ingredients belong to the sauce, not the dough.
- The hinge: work it as little as possibleThe butter is rubbed in with the fingertips and the liquid added all at once, then the dough is patted out and baked immediately. Kneading or re-rolling develops gluten and turns a tender shortcake into a bread roll.
- The milk quantity is doubtful"1½ cup" of milk against 2 cups of flour would give a batter, not a dough that can be split. The intended amount is almost certainly around half a cup, added gradually until the dough just holds together; add cautiously rather than trusting the printed figure.
- OvenBaking follows Strawberry Short Cake II, which is not reproduced here; the book gives no numerical temperatures, so a hot oven in modern terms is roughly 425–450°F. An 8- or 9-inch round pan, 15 to 20 minutes, until the top is well browned.
- Cream Sauce IIThe stray "1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 egg" is the sauce: butter creamed with sugar, then the beaten egg worked in. It is an uncooked sauce, so use pasteurized egg if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term covers finely ground sugar generally; for sprinkling over sliced berries, granulated or superfine works as intended. Let the berries stand 20 to 30 minutes so they give up juice.
- Splitting the cakeSplit while still warm, pulling the layers apart with a fork rather than cutting, which gives the rough surface that soaks up juice. Some period shortcake recipes butter the cut faces before the sauce goes on, though this one does not.
- Nutmeg"Few grains" means a scant pinch from a whole nutmeg grated fresh — enough to be noticed only as warmth behind the butter.
- YieldRoughly one 8- or 9-inch round, about six servings on a modern reckoning; the recipe gives no pan size or yield. Best within an hour of baking.
Shortcake takes its name from "short" in the baker's sense — a dough carrying enough fat to break tender rather than stretch — and in American kitchens of the nineteenth century it meant a biscuit dough, not the sponge or sweetened sandwich cake sold under the name today. Strawberry shortcake appears in mid-century cookbooks, and it is often described as a June ritual, when berries were briefly and locally abundant and the dessert had to be assembled the day they were picked. Fannie Farmer's book gives several versions in ascending richness, this one distinguished by egg, extra butter and nutmeg, and pairs it with a creamed butter-and-egg sauce of the kind eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooks used on puddings. The presence of four teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of flour is itself a period marker: chemical leavening was cheap and reliable by the 1890s, and the Boston Cooking-School style leaned on it hard.