Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry Shortcake
Make good biscuit crust; bake in two tins of same shape and size; mix berries with plenty of sugar, open the shortcake; butter well and place berries in layers, alternated with the crust; have the top layer of berries and over all put charlotte russe or whipped cream.
A shortcake in the American sense: split biscuit dough, not sponge cake. The recipe assumes you already know how to make biscuit, so the quantities have to be supplied.
- The hingeButter the split rounds while they are still hot, then assemble at the last minute. Biscuit soaks up strawberry juice fast, and a cake built even half an hour ahead will slump into pink mush.
- "Good biscuit crust"A standard baking-powder biscuit dough, made rich and rolled thick rather than cut into rounds: about 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4 to 6 tablespoons butter cut in, and roughly 3/4 cup milk. Handle it as little as possible.
- Tins and ovenTwo 8- or 9-inch round cake tins, dough pressed out to about half an inch. The recipe gives no oven direction at all; bake at about 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are dry and lightly coloured.
- Berries and sugar"Plenty of sugar" is about 1/3 to 1/2 cup per quart of hulled, sliced berries. Let them stand 30 minutes so they give up juice, and crush a portion of them so there is syrup to soak the crust.
- Charlotte russeHere it is clearly used for something spoonable, and in some American books of the period the name is applied to the sweetened cream itself rather than the moulded dessert; such creams were sometimes lightened with beaten egg white or set with a little gelatine. Plain whipped cream, barely sweetened, does the job the recipe intends.
- AssemblyBottom layer of biscuit, buttered, then berries; second biscuit on top, buttered, then the rest of the berries; cream over all. The instruction to "open the shortcake" means splitting each baked round horizontally if you want four thin layers instead of two thick ones.
- YieldOne two-tin cake serves 6 to 8. It does not keep; cut and eat the same day.
Strawberry shortcake built on biscuit dough rather than sponge is a distinctly American form, and by the 1870s it was a common dessert of the strawberry season, when the fruit arrived all at once and had to be used within days. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by local housewives and sold for charitable benefit, which explains its structure: short, unmeasured instructions written by cooks for other cooks who already knew what biscuit dough looked like. Buttering the split crust appears to be the older practice, before the sweetened, cake-like shortcakes that came later; the butter both flavours the biscuit and slows the juice slightly. The topping named here, charlotte russe, shows how loosely the term travelled in America: once a dessert of ladyfinger- or sponge-lined mould filled with cream, the name came in some American usage to stand for the sweetened cream alone.