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July 8
Menu: Mashed Potatoes; Broiled Chicken; New Peas; Tomato Mayonnaise; Red Raspberry Shortcake, Hot; Marshmallow Sauce; Coffee Red Raspberry Shortcake-4 cups sifted flour, 3 tablespoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons Crisco, milk, and 2 quarts red raspberries. Sift baking powder and salt with flour, rub in Crisco; then with fork stir in lightly and quickly sufficient milk to make soft doughtoo soft to roll. Turn it into Criscoed tin, and bake in hot oven 30 minutes. Unmold, and leaving it inverted, cut circle around top within 1 inch of edge; lift off circle of crust, and with fork pick out crumb from center, leaving about 3/4 of an inch of biscuit around sides. Spread inside cake with butter, fill with crushed raspberries, which have been standing /½ hour or more mixed with enough sugar to sweeten them. Turn off juice from berries before filling cake. Replace circle of crust, and serve with following sauce: 1/2 pound marshmallows, 1½ cup confectioners' sugar, and ½ cup boiling water. Cut marshmallows in pieces and melt in double boiler. Dissolve sugar in boiling water, add to marshmallows, and stir until blended. Serve hot with shortcake.
A biscuit-dough shortcake baked as one large round, hollowed out and packed with sweetened raspberries. The technique matters more than the measurements here, several of which the original leaves open.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no numbers; period guides generally put a "hot oven" somewhere around 400-450F. Thirty minutes at that heat suits a single deep cake of biscuit dough; check at 25 minutes, as the loaf browns fast.
- Milk is unmeasured on purposeExpect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for 4 cups of flour. The target is a dough too slack to roll but still able to hold a shape when scraped into the tin -- wetter than biscuit dough, stiffer than batter.
- The panA "Criscoed tin" is simply a greased tin; the recipe gives no size or shape, though cutting a circle from the top implies a round pan. It needs to be deep enough to hollow out and leave a 3/4-inch shell -- a 9- to 10-inch round at least 2 inches deep works.
- LeaveningThree tablespoons of baking powder to 4 cups of flour is at the upper end of what works; period powders varied in composition and modern double-acting powder does not behave identically. Two tablespoons gives plenty of lift without a metallic aftertaste.
- Very little fatTwo tablespoons of shortening to 4 cups of flour makes a lean, bready crumb rather than a rich one. The book is selling Crisco, not economising, but if you want a tender shortcake use 1/2 to 3/4 cup and rub it in to a coarse-meal texture.
- Draining the berriesThe instruction to pour off the juice before filling is the hinge. Two quarts of crushed sweetened raspberries throw a great deal of liquid, and the hollowed shell turns to mush if it goes in wet. Keep the drained juice and spoon it over at the table.
- Unmolding while hotTurn the cake out as soon as it comes from the oven and cut the lid while it is still warm; the crumb pulls away cleanly with a fork then, and tears once it cools and sets.
- The marshmallow sauceAs printed the sauce takes 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar dissolved in 1/2 cup boiling water, which makes a very thick, very sweet syrup and may be a misprint. Half a pound of melted marshmallows is already sweet and the sauce should pour, not glaze, so start with less sugar and add more only if it needs body.
- YieldA cake this size serves 8 to 10, and it is at its best within an hour or two of filling.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening to American kitchens, and nearly every recipe in it exists to show that the new fat could stand in for butter or lard anywhere -- hence the two token tablespoons of Crisco in a shortcake dough and the greased "Criscoed tin." The "Calendar of Dinners" section assigned a full menu to each day of the year, and this one belongs to July 9, at the height of the raspberry season in the northern states. Shortcake in the American sense has generally been a biscuit rather than a sponge, split or hollowed and loaded with fruit; the hollowing-out method here, with the crust lifted off as a lid, is often said to have been an alternative to splitting. The marshmallow sauce is very much of its moment -- commercial marshmallows are generally thought to have become cheap and widely available not long before, and cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s melted them into sauces, frostings and fruit salads with enthusiasm.