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Strawberry Shortcake (Sift together one quart)
Sift together one quart of flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a little salt, a teaspoonful of sugar, and into it chop three tablespoonfuls of butter. Add one cupful of sweet milk. Put together as quickly and with as little mixing or handling as possible. Bake in a well greased pan, laying one sheet on top of the other, or what is better, bake in three pans. As soon as baked, put between the crusts a thick layer of well sweetened strawberries and also cover the top with berries. Serve with sugar and cream.
A biscuit-dough shortcake of the old American kind, given without an oven temperature or a baking time. A few notes on the measurements will get you there.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in bulk: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 450 g. Sifted and spooned in lightly, that is the figure to work from.
- The liquid is tightOne cup of milk to four cups of flour makes a very stiff, dry dough by modern habit. Have another quarter to half cup of milk at hand and add it until the dough just holds together — it should be soft enough to pat out, not crumbly.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for four cups of flour is lean; current practice runs closer to a teaspoon per cup. Four teaspoons will give a better rise without any off taste.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk used with saleratus. Whole milk.
- OvenNone is stated. Bake in a hot oven, 425–450°F, for 12–15 minutes for thin layers in three pans, or 20–25 minutes for thicker stacked sheets. The tops should be pale gold and the sides dry.
- The stacked sheetsWhen baking one sheet on top of another, butter the surface of the lower one generously before laying the second over it — that is what lets them lift apart cleanly when hot. Three separate pans, as the recipe prefers, avoids the problem entirely.
- HandlingThe instruction to work quickly with as little mixing as possible is the hinge of the whole thing. Overworked dough turns tough and bready; cut the butter in until it is the size of peas, stir in the milk just to combine, and pat rather than roll.
- The berriesHull, slice and sugar the strawberries 30 minutes ahead, crushing about a third of them so they give up juice. Roughly 2 lb of berries for a full quart-of-flour shortcake.
- YieldServes 8 generously. Assemble at the last minute — the layers are meant to be filled while still warm, and it goes soggy on standing.
"Short" in shortcake means shortened with fat, the same sense as shortbread and shortening: the butter cut through the flour interrupts the gluten and gives a crumbly, tender crumb. The biscuit-dough version here is the older American form; the split sponge cake and the packaged sweet cup-shaped shortcake came later. Strawberries had a short, intense season in June before refrigerated shipping, and turn-of-the-century books often place shortcake, strawberry preserves and strawberry ice within a few pages of one another. Serving fruit with sugar and plain cream rather than whipped cream was common in the period.