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Fruit Shortcake
2 cups flour
⅓ cup shortening
4 teaspoons baking-powder
¾ cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
Butter
1 tablespoon sugar
Mix and sift the dry ingredients and work in the shortening with the fingers or a knife. Gradually add enough milk to make a soft dough, mixing with a knife. Toss the dough on to a floured board and tap and roll to one-half inch thickness. Bake in sheets for a large shortcake or cut with a biscuit cutter for individual shortcakes. Bake in a hot oven for twelve minutes. When done, split into two parts, butter and put sweetened fruit between the layers and on top. Serve hot with cream.
Any fresh berries, peaches, oranges, bananas, or stewed fruits, fresh or dried, may be used for shortcake.
A plain biscuit-dough shortcake, the American form rather than the sponge-cake version. The dough should be handled as little as possible.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figures; a "hot oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 425-450F. Twelve minutes suits half-inch rounds; a full sheet will likely need longer, until the top is set and lightly coloured.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means lard or a compound vegetable shortening. Cold butter works and tastes better; keep it cold and stop working it in while pea-sized lumps remain.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is a heavy hand by modern standards. Two and a half to three teaspoons of current double-acting powder will raise it adequately and avoid a metallic edge.
- The soft doughThe hinge of the recipe. Add milk until the dough just holds together and no further, and use the knife rather than your hands. Overworked shortcake dough bakes dense and dry.
- Splitting and butteringSplit the rounds while hot and butter the cut faces at once so the butter soaks in, as the recipe directs.
- The fruitSugar the fruit and let it stand 20-30 minutes before assembling so it gives up juice. Berries want crushing slightly; firm fruit like peaches benefits from a longer macerating time.
- Cream"Serve with cream" most likely means pouring cream rather than whipped. Either works; unwhipped cream poured over the hot shortcake is the plainer reading.
- YieldRoughly ten to twelve individual cakes from a two-inch cutter, depending on re-rolling; as a single sheet, several servings.
Shortcake in American cookbooks of this period is almost always a biscuit dough enriched with fat, "short" in the old baking sense of tender and crumbling rather than sweet or cakey. Strawberry shortcake was the famous summer form, celebrated at church suppers and strawberry festivals through the nineteenth century, but as the closing line here shows, the dough was treated as a year-round vehicle for whatever fruit was on hand, including stewed dried fruit in winter. The recipe is written for both a single sheet and individual rounds and assumes nothing beyond a biscuit cutter and a hot oven.