Home › Honey, Ices and Gelatines › Honey Shortcake
Honey Shortcake
3 cups of flour, 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 cup shortening, 1½ cups sweet milk. Roll quickly and bake in a hot oven. When done, split the cake and spread the lower half thinly with butter, add the upper half with 1/2 pound of the best flavored honey. (Candied honey is preferred., If too hard to spread well it should be slightly warmed or creamed with a knife.) Let it stand a few minutes and the honey will melt gradually and the flavor will permeate all through the cake. To be eaten with milk.
This is a biscuit dough baked as one round cake, split and filled with crystallized honey rather than fruit. The original gives no pan, no time and no yield, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. A shortcake of this thickness wants 15 to 20 minutes at that heat; the surface should be pale gold and the sides dry to the touch.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk. The term distinguishes it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would generally have called for soda rather than baking powder.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period this means lard, or butter, or an early vegetable shortening — any solid fat cut into the flour. Half a cup to three cups of flour gives a lean, biscuit-like crumb rather than a rich one.
- The leavening is lightTwo teaspoons of baking powder for three cups of flour is less than most modern biscuit formulas use. Expect a fairly dense, close cake, which suits a cake meant to absorb honey.
- Roll quicklyThis is the hinge. A cup and a half of milk to three cups of flour makes a soft, sticky dough, and it must be patted or rolled out with the least handling possible. Working it smooth develops gluten and the cake turns tough and bready.
- Candied honeyCrystallized honey — honey that has granulated in the jar, which was ordinary and expected before commercial filtering and pasteurization made it rare. Any honey that has set solid will do; warm the jar gently in water or work it with a knife blade until spreadable.
- Half a pound of honeyAbout two thirds of a cup. Spread on a hot split cake it will slacken and soak downward, which is why the recipe tells you to let it stand.
- Pan and yieldAn 8- or 9-inch round pan or a well-floured baking sheet would both serve. Cut into six to eight wedges; the recipe says only 'to be eaten with milk,' which puts it closer to a supper dish than a dessert.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookery generally meant this sort of thing: a quickly made, lightly enriched biscuit dough baked in a round, split while hot and filled — with strawberries in season, and with whatever the pantry held the rest of the year. Crystallization was a household fact rather than a fault, and the recipe treats it as an advantage: candied honey spreads and stays put on a cut surface instead of running off. "To be eaten with milk" places the dish at the plainer end of the table, closer to a bowl of bread and milk than to a company dessert.