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Fruit Fillings for Shortcake
1-Sliced oranges, peaches or strawberries sweetened with Karo, Red Label. 2-Sliced bananas, pears or shredded pineapple sweetened with Karo, Red Label. Add a little lemon juice. 3-Baked or stewed apple or rhubarb sauce.
Three sweetened fruit mixtures to spoon between and over shortcake layers, written as suggestions rather than measured formulas. The quantities are left entirely to the cook, so a little arithmetic is needed before you start.
- Karo Red LabelIn this period Karo sold under colored labels: Blue Label was the crystal-white syrup, Red Label a darker, golden grade carrying refiners'-syrup flavor. No modern grade matches it exactly; today's light corn syrup is milder and clearer, while dark corn syrup is closer in flavor but heavier, and may overwhelm strawberries or peaches.
- Corn syrup is less sweet than sugarLight corn syrup is generally reckoned somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters as sweet as granulated sugar, depending on the syrup, so it takes more of it to reach the same effect. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons per cup of sliced fruit and taste, since ripeness varies more than the syrup does.
- It will not macerate the fruitIt macerates more slowly -- Granulated sugar dissolves into berries and peaches and pulls juice out within half an hour; a thick syrup does draw juice, but more slowly and less freely. If you want the loose, self-saucing juice that shortcake depends on, crush or mash part of the fruit before sweetening, or let the mixture stand an hour and stir once or twice.
- Why the lemon juice is in the second groupBananas and pears brown on cut surfaces and are low in acid. A tablespoon of lemon juice per two cups of fruit checks the discoloration and keeps the filling from tasting flat under all that syrup.
- Fresh pineapple"Shredded pineapple" in this period often meant the canned product. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not harm the fruit itself but will break down gelatin and can thin an egg-thickened custard; canned pineapple has been heated, so the enzyme is no longer active.
- The apple and rhubarb optionNote that the third suggestion carries no syrup at all, on the assumption that your applesauce or rhubarb sauce is already sweetened. Rhubarb needs a good deal of sweetening and should be cooked only until the stalks slump, five to eight minutes, or it collapses into thread.
- QuantityFigure about 3 cups of prepared fruit for an 8- or 9-inch two-layer shortcake serving six to eight, split between the middle and the top.
- The shortcake itselfShortcake in an American book of this date usually means the biscuit type, split hot and buttered, rather than sponge cake. These fillings are wet by design and are best assembled shortly before eating.
The naming of a specific Karo label points to one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the makers of Karo, the corn syrup brand put on the market by the Corn Products companies early in the twentieth century, and the purpose is plain in the writing: every fruit is sweetened with a named label of a single product. Booklets like this were distributed free with grocery purchases and by mail, and they worked to move corn syrup out of the pancake role and into cakes, candies, canning and puddings. The pitch gained ground during the First World War, when sugar was short and conservation campaigns urged housekeepers toward syrups and molasses, an argument corn syrup advertising of the period took up directly. Shortcake was a shrewd vehicle, being an old American summer standby of split biscuit and crushed fruit that needed only a change of sweetener to sell a tin.