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Raspberry Shortcake
Place a quart well picked and cleaned raspberries in a bowl, with two tablespoons powdered sugar, a tablespoon each kirsch and maraschino and half teaspoon vanilla essence. Carefully mix the cherries in the seasoning without mashing them, then proceed to make the shortcake exactly the same as strawberry shortcake and serve the same way.
A macerated-fruit filling rather than a full recipe: the cake itself is borrowed from the book's strawberry shortcake, so this entry is really about seasoning the berries. A few points on the original's shorthand.
- "The cherries"A slip; the fruit in hand is raspberries. Mix them gently, with a folding motion rather than stirring, since raspberries collapse far faster than strawberries.
- A quart of raspberriesRoughly 4 cups; by weight somewhere in the region of 16-20 oz, or three to four 6-oz supermarket punnets. Two tablespoons of sugar is restrained for that quantity; taste and add more if the fruit is sharp.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term covers finely ground white sugar generally, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to icing sugar. Either dissolves quickly into the berry juice; skip cornstarch-heavy confectioners' sugar if you want a clear syrup.
- Kirsch and maraschinoKirsch is a dry cherry brandy, maraschino a sweet liqueur made from marasca cherries and their kernels. Modern Luxardo-style maraschino is the right thing; the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries is not.
- Vanilla essenceRead as vanilla extract. Half a teaspoon against two tablespoons of spirits is a background note, not a flavour in its own right.
- Macerating timeTwenty to thirty minutes at room temperature is enough to draw out juice without turning the fruit to mush. Raspberries left an hour or more in sugar and alcohol will slump.
- The shortcake itselfAlmost certainly a baking-powder biscuit dough, split and buttered, rather than a sponge. No method, temperature or time is given here; the reader is sent to the book's strawberry shortcake entry.
- ServingFollow the strawberry version, which is where the assembly and any cream are specified. Assemble at the table, since a soaked biscuit does not hold.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades as a manager and cook at Delmonico's in New York, and his books work through long alphabetical runs of variations, which is why a raspberry shortcake appears as little more than a fruit seasoning appended to the strawberry entry. Shortcake in this sense is American and older than the book: a sweetened biscuit dough, split and layered with sugared fruit and cream, well established by the mid-nineteenth century and firmly associated with strawberries. The pair of liqueurs points to restaurant rather than domestic writing. Kirsch and maraschino were common bar and pastry stock in a hotel kitchen of the period, used the way a modern pastry cook reaches for a splash of eau-de-vie, and their presence turns a plain summer dessert into something meant to be sent out on a plate.