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Orange Shortcake
One quart flour, two table-spoons butter, two tea-spoons baking powder thoroughly mixed with the flour; mix (not very stiff) with cold water, work as little as possible, bake, split open, and lay sliced oranges between; cut in squares and serve with pudding Berries may be used instead of oranges. -Mrs. Canby, Bellesauce. fontaine.
A plain biscuit dough, split and filled with fruit — the nineteenth-century American shortcake, closer to a split baking-powder biscuit than to anything sponge-like. The dough is deliberately soft and barely handled, and that is the whole trick.
- Handle it as little as possibleThe instruction to "work as little as possible" is the hinge. Bring the dough together with a fork until it just holds, pat it out, and stop. Kneading develops gluten and turns shortcake tough and bready.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in scoops: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz of modern all-purpose flour. Expect to need about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of cold water for a soft, slightly sticky dough.
- Leavening is light by current practiceTwo teaspoons of baking powder for 4 cups of flour is roughly half to a third what a modern biscuit recipe uses. Period baking powders were single-acting and variable in strength; with today's double-acting powder, 3 to 4 teaspoons gives the rise a reader will expect.
- No salt, no sugarThe dough as written contains neither. A teaspoon and a half of salt is worth adding for flavour. The sweetness is meant to come entirely from the fruit and the sauce.
- The butter is scantTwo tablespoons in over a pound of flour makes a lean dough — this is a shortcake in the older sense, where "short" is relative. Rub the cold butter into the flour with the fingertips before adding water.
- Oven heatThe recipe says only "bake." Shortcake wants fast heat: 425-450F for 15 to 20 minutes, until well risen and lightly coloured. A slow oven dries it out before it lifts.
- Split while hotOpen the cake as soon as it comes out, using a fork rather than a knife so the crumb tears instead of compressing. Layer the sliced oranges in at once so the juice soaks the warm crumb; toss the slices with a little sugar first if they are tart.
- "Pudding sauce"The line is garbled in the original; it appears to read "serve with pudding sauce." Nineteenth-century pudding sauces ranged from hard sauce (creamed butter and sugar, softening over the hot cake) to a thin cornstarch-and-sugar sauce flavoured with lemon or wine. Whipped cream is a reasonable modern substitute.
- YieldA quart of flour makes a generous cake in a large square or round pan, cut into 8 to 10 squares.
Shortcake in nineteenth-century American cookery meant a biscuit dough baked in a single large round or square, split, and filled with fruit — the pale, sweet sponge cups sold today are a twentieth-century convenience. Strawberry was the standard, and the closing line here ("Berries may be used instead of oranges") shows which version the contributor assumed her readers already knew. Oranges may signal something about the book's region and date: The Dixie Cook-Book was compiled from contributions by Southern housewives, and Florida citrus is generally said to have been moving north by rail by around this period, which would make winter oranges a plausible substitute for summer berries. Like most of the recipes in the collection, this one carries the name and town of the woman who sent it in, which is how such community-sourced cookbooks established their authority — not by a professional author, but by a roster of named cooks vouching for their own dishes.