Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry Shortcake
Make a suitable quantity of baking powder biscuit dough; and instead of cutting it into biscuits, quickly roll it out about one-half inch thick, lay it upon a flat, buttered plate, and bake at once. While it is still hot cut the crust around the edge so the cake can be pulled apart in equal pieces, and spread the inner side of each half with butter. Crush a pint of ripe strawberries, sweeten them, and spread them upon the buttered sides of the cake. Now arrange upon the lower half an even layer of whole berries, using the smaller ones for the purpose; and sprinkle with sugar. Lay upon these berries the other half, crust side down, cover it with a layer of the finest berries, and sprinkle them generously with sugar. Serve cold with cream, or hot, as preferred.
A true shortcake in the older American sense: a single thick baking-powder biscuit, split hot and buttered, not a sponge cake. Everything depends on getting it into a hot oven the moment it is mixed.
- Dough quantity"A suitable quantity" means a standard biscuit batch — about 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 cup butter or shortening, and roughly 3/4 cup milk. Rolled a half inch thick this fills an 8- or 9-inch round.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies no temperature. Biscuit dough wants a hot oven: in modern terms roughly 425-450F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the top is well browned. A slack oven tends to give a pale, dense cake.
- Bake at onceThis is the hinge. Baking powder begins working the instant the milk goes in, so mix, roll and bake without pause. Dough left standing on the board loses its rise.
- The "flat, buttered plate"A metal pie plate or a cake tin. Do not use a modern ceramic or glass dinner plate, which is not made for oven heat; the plate intended was most likely tinware or granite-ware.
- Splitting the cakeRun a knife around the crusted edge, then pull the two halves apart with your fingers rather than cutting straight through. The torn surface is rough and soaks up juice; a knife-cut face stays slick.
- A pint of strawberriesAbout 12 ounces, or 2 cups hulled and sliced. Sweeten the crushed berries with 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar and let them stand 15 minutes to draw out juice before spreading.
- "Serve with cream"Here this means unwhipped heavy or single cream poured over the top at the table, not piped whipped cream. Either works, but the poured version is what is intended.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch shortcake serves four to six. It does not keep — the biscuit stales within hours and the berries soften it, so build it close to serving time.
Strawberry shortcake of this kind is the older and more strictly American form: a rich biscuit, split and buttered while hot, rather than the sponge or pound-cake base that took over later in the twentieth century. "Short" refers to the fat in the dough, the same sense as shortbread and shortcrust. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in the era when strawberries were a brief, intensely seasonal event in most households — hence a recipe built around berries at their peak, with the smallest hidden inside and the finest saved for the top. It was a dessert course, served with cream, not something sliced for tea.