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Strawberry Shortcake
Sift one and one-half pounds of flour and three heaping teaspoonfuls of baking-powder through a fine hair-sieve onto a marble slab, then rub in three ounces of butter until it is perfectly smooth, add one saltspoonful of salt, a little more than one-half teacupful of sugar, and stir in sufficient milk to form the whole into a stiff paste. Mix well, dredge the paste lightly over with flour, and roll it out very thin. Divide the paste into six equal-sized squares. Butter a shallow baking-dish, put in one square of the paste, spread a little butter over it, and dredge it lightly over with flour; place another square of paste over the first one, flour and butter that also, and proceed in the same way with the remainder. Put the cake into a brisk oven, and bake it for about twenty minutes. When cooked, turn the cake out of the tin, lay it on a dish, and put over it as many fresh strawberries as will cover it, strew over some powdered sugar, and cover with another layer of cake. Finish with alternate layers of strawberries and cake, making the last layer of strawberries, over which sift more sugar. Whip about one pint of rich cream to a stiff froth, pile it all around the cake, and serve.
This is a laminated biscuit dough rather than a cake: six thin sheets stacked with butter and flour between them, baked as one, then split back into layers for filling. Understanding that is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: buttered layers, not one thick biscuitThe butter and flour dredged between the six squares keep them from fusing, so the baked slab pulls apart cleanly into sheets. Skimp on either and you get a single dense round that has to be sawed apart.
- Flour quantityOne and a half pounds of flour is roughly 5 1/2 to 6 cups, sifted — a large amount. Halving the whole recipe gives a correspondingly smaller dessert.
- Teacup and saltspoonA period teacup is variously reckoned at 4 to 6 fl oz, so "a little more than one-half teacupful" of sugar comes out somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup. A saltspoonful is usually taken as 1/4 teaspoon.
- Brisk ovenBrisk is generally reckoned at about 400 to 425F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for thin stacked sheets; check that the edges are set and pale gold rather than waiting for deep colour.
- Hair sieve and marble slabA fine-mesh sieve and any cool work surface do the job. Marble matters only because it keeps the butter firm while you rub it into the flour — worth chilling a board if your kitchen is warm.
- Only three ounces of butterSix tablespoons for over five cups of flour makes a lean, bready dough that depends on the interleaved butter and the cream for richness. Do not judge the mixed dough by modern biscuit standards; it should be stiff, not soft.
- The berriesThe recipe lays the berries on whole and sifts sugar over them in place. Slicing and sugaring them twenty to thirty minutes ahead will draw out juice to moisten the layers. Assemble just before serving or the sheets soften into paste.
- The creamA pint of heavy cream whipped to stiff peaks, piled around the sides rather than spread on top. It is unsweetened here, on the assumption that the sifted sugar over the berries carries the sweetness.
Strawberry shortcake in this form — sweetened biscuit dough rather than sponge, layered with sugared fruit and cream — is a distinctly American dessert, and by the 1890s it was a fixture of hotel and restaurant menus during the short northern strawberry season. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his book in 1896. The layered, buttered-and-floured construction produces six thin tiers instead of two, so a single dish can be built high enough to serve a table.