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Strawberry Shortcake (Good old-fashioned strawberry)
The good old-fashioned strawberry shortcake is made like biscuit dough, with considerable more butter in it, but it must be stirred only to the consistency of a stiff paste. Then, with well floured hands, a lump of the soft dough is taken and thinly pressed inside of a well buttered tin pie plate. Upon this is spread a little more butter, when another thin layer of the dough is pressed over that. When baked in a quick oven, the brown cake is transferred from the tin pan to a large dinner plate. The top layer is then easily removed without cutting that would spoil it-and upon the under one is spread a thick layer of strawberries, a little mashed and sprinkled with sugar to the taste. Upon these berries the top layer is then placed, bottom side up, and another layer of strawberries follows. Serve very hot or not stone cold.
This is the regulation New England strawberry shortcake of fifty years ago. It is delicious.
The recipe assumes you know biscuit dough by feel and gives no quantities at all, so the useful work here is filling in numbers and explaining the buttered-split trick that makes the method work.
- The hinge: butter between the layersThe smear of butter between the two pressed-out rounds is what lets the baked cake pull apart cleanly in two sheets rather than being sawn through. Be generous with it, and do not let the edges of the two layers seal together.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. A shortcake this thin wants high heat and a short bake, roughly 12-15 minutes, until the top is well browned.
- Working quantitiesFor one 9-inch pie plate: 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 6-8 tablespoons butter cut in, and about 3/4 cup milk. "Considerable more butter" than biscuit dough means roughly double the usual proportion.
- "Stirred only to the consistency of a stiff paste"This is the standard biscuit warning against overworking. Stir until the dough just holds together and press it out with floured hands rather than rolling; it should look rough.
- Tin pie plateA dark metal or glass pie plate works. Heavy stoneware is slower to come up to heat, which may cost you some crispness on the underside.
- The berriesAbout 1 1/2 to 2 pounds hulled berries, half of them crushed with sugar and left to sit 20-30 minutes so they give up juice, the rest sliced. The juice will soak into the cut faces of the cake.
- "Serve very hot or not stone cold"Assemble close to serving; the longer the berries sit on the cake, the softer the crumb goes.
- YieldOne 9-inch shortcake, cut in wedges, serves 4 to 6.
The dividing line in American shortcake is between the biscuit camp and the sponge-cake camp, and this recipe plants its flag firmly in the first: butter-rich biscuit dough, split rather than sliced, served hot. The author dates the "regulation New England" version to fifty years before writing; if the book is of about 1900, that points to the 1850s, by which time strawberry shortcake was turning up in American cookbooks and commercial baking powder was beginning to be sold alongside saleratus and sour milk for quick doughs. The insistence on serving it hot marks it as a dish of the strawberry season rather than a year-round dessert, made in the few weeks when local berries were ripe and cheap. The store-bought sponge cup, which many Americans now think of as shortcake, came later.