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Peach Shortcake
Peel one quart of ripe peaches, cut them in small pieces, mix them with a breakfast cupful of sugar, and set them in a cool place. Rub eight ounces of butter in twelve ounces of flour, make a hollow in the center, then pour in one breakfast cupful of ice water, and mix it up soft. Sprinkle a little flour over a paste-board, and roll the paste out on it, folding and rolling it out three or four times to make it flakey; gather the paste into a lump, let it stand five minutes, then roll it about one-fourth inch in thickness, and bake it on a baking-sheet. Split the cake into two when baked, spread some peaches and sugar on the lower half, put the top on, the cut side up, and spread more peaches and sugar over that, place it on a dish, and serve with cream.
This is a shortcake in the older sense: a flaky rough-puff paste rather than the sweetened baking-powder biscuit most Americans expect. The original gives weights for the pastry and no oven temperature, so a scale and your own judgment do most of the work.
- Breakfast cupfulIn turn-of-the-century American kitchens a breakfast cup is roughly 8 fl oz, so read it as one standard cup of sugar and one cup of ice water. Some Victorian tables put the breakfast cup nearer 10 oz, which matters for the water more than the sugar.
- The water is the riskA full cup of ice water into 12 oz (about 2 3/4 cups) of flour will give a slack, sticky mass. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together; "mix it up soft" means pliable, not wet.
- Weigh the pastryEight ounces butter to twelve ounces flour is a two-to-three fat ratio, richer than pie pastry. Volume measures will not hit it reliably, so weigh both. Keep the butter cold and leave it in visible flakes when rubbing it in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A paste this flaky wants a hot oven, 425F, for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the layers have lifted and the surface is a deep gold. A cooler oven melts the butter out before the steam can raise the leaves.
- No leavening, no saltThere is neither baking powder nor salt in the paste; all the rise comes from the folding. A pinch of salt in the flour is a reasonable addition and will not change the structure.
- The peachesA quart of peeled, cut fruit is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or four to five medium peaches. Macerating them with a cup of sugar an hour or more ahead draws out the syrup that soaks the cake, which is plausibly the point of setting them in a cool place.
- Assemble lateSplit and fill while the cake is barely warm and serve at once. A butter paste of this kind goes soft quickly under wet fruit, and the halves cannot be crisped again once soaked.
- Cream means pouring creamHeavy cream, unwhipped and unsweetened, poured at the table.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the working formulas of the Waldorf kitchens around 1896, and this entry differs from the home version of the same dish. American shortcake had two lines of descent: the quick sweetened biscuit dough found in many cookbooks of the period, and the older rich short paste, closer to a rough puff, which is what is described here. Peaches were a major summer fruit of the eastern seaboard in that era, reaching markets by rail from Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey orchards, and peach shortcake was a late-summer seasonal dish. The instruction to lay the split cake back cut side up, so the fruit and syrup sit on the open crumb rather than the baked crust, is a practical touch.