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Peach Shortcake, Sweet
Three eggs; one cup of sugar; two cups of flour; one tablespoon of butter; one teaspoon of baking powder. Rub the butter and sugar together until smooth, beat the eggs light, and add them to the butter and sugar. Mix the baking powder with the flour, pass through a sieve at least twice and stir into the other mixture. Butter three deep tin plates, place the dough in them, and bake for twenty minutes. Cut the peaches in small pieces and sweeten. Spread a layer of the fruit on one of the cakes, lay over this another cake, cover this also with peaches, and then add the third cake. The top may be spread with fruit or with a meringue made of the beaten white of one egg and one tablespoon of powdered sugar.
This is the cake-style shortcake rather than the biscuit kind: a lean sponge leavened mostly by beaten eggs, baked thin in three layers and stacked with sweetened raw fruit. A few things the original leaves unsaid.
- The batter has no liquidThree eggs are the only moisture for two cups of flour, so the air you beat into them does most of the lifting, with only a teaspoon of baking powder to help. Beat the eggs until pale and thick, and fold the sifted flour in rather than stirring it hard, or the layers bake up tough and shallow.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350–375F, suits thin layers baked twenty minutes; test with a skewer at eighteen minutes since these are shallow and dry out quickly.
- Deep tin platesThese are pie plates rather than cake pans. No size is given; deep plates of roughly nine inches are a reasonable modern stand-in, so long as all three match. Butter them well and line the bases with parchment; a lean sponge in a sloped tin plate is inclined to stick.
- How much fruitUnspecified in the original. For three layers of pie-plate size, allow roughly four to six ripe peaches, sugared with 2 to 3 tablespoons and left to stand twenty minutes so they release juice.
- Assemble lateJuicy fruit on a lean sponge turns the layers sodden within an hour. Stack no more than half an hour before serving.
- The meringue toppingOne beaten white with a tablespoon of powdered sugar, spread on a cooled cake, is not cooked at any point. If that matters to you, brown it briefly under a hot broiler, use pasteurized whites, or top with whipped cream instead.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon for two cups of flour is very little by modern standards because the eggs are doing the work. Modern double-acting powder is a fair substitute for what the book intended; do not increase it, or the crumb goes coarse and tastes of soda.
- YieldEight to ten servings. It does not keep — eat it the day it is made.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century America split into two camps that both went by the same name: the biscuit sort, rich with butter and split hot, and the sweet cake sort given here, which is closer to a thin sponge layered like a torte. Butterick, a pattern company whose cookbook was aimed at the same middle-class household that bought its dress patterns, was working in a moment when both sorts were current, and the word "Sweet" in the title is doing the work of telling them apart. Peaches were the summer fruit for this treatment in the period — cheap, abundant in season, impossible to keep — and the recipe's assumption that you would simply cut them up and sugar them reflects a kitchen where fruit was eaten at its brief peak rather than stored. The tin pie plates called for were standard equipment, and by most accounts were in kitchens well before dedicated layer-cake pans became common.