REC Rich Strawbery Shortcake--KC has me thinking about our upcoming crop of strawberries!

W

wigs

Well-known member
RICH STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

My mother always made and served these homemade shortcake biscuits. This recipe came from her mother and is from at least the 1940s. I'm clueless as to where in the world Grandma Watkins originally found this recipe.

2 cups sifted enriched flour

2 Tablespoons sugar

3 teaspoons baking powder (My mother always rounded her measuring teaspoons of baking powder for this recipe. Make sure your baking powder is fresh.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1 beaten egg

1/2 cup light cream or whole milk (Mother always used half and half.)

Soft butter or margarine, for spreading

4 cups sweetened, sliced strawberries

Sift dry ingredients together. Cut in 1/2 cup butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Combine egg and cream and add to flour mixture, stirring just until dough follows fork around bowl.

On a lightly floured surface, pat or roll dough to 1/2 inch depth. Cut out biscuits with a 3-1/2-inch round biscuit cutter. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet in a very hot preheated 450-degree F. oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until centers are done and not doughy.

Split shortcakes in half horizontally and butter the insides of the tops and bottoms. Spoon berries between biscuit layers and also over the tops. Serve warm with sweetened whipped cream or homemade vanilla ice cream. Makes six servings. (Keep in mind that serving size was probably intended for threshers and farmers who worked with horses pulling their plows! Caryn aka Wigs)

 
LOL, so, are you trying to say we here don't work as hard as farmers and threshers, and should

cut the servings in half?? got me chuckling!

 
I always laughed at the recipes in my old Farm Journal Cookbook-same thing

They would call for huge quantities-a recipe with 3 pounds of ground beef might be four servings. Those men worked!

 
AngAk, my dad and grandfather would be in the fields at 5 AM and around 7 they were coming into the

house for their breakfast of steak & eggs (Daddy always ate 6 fried eggs--fried in bacon grease, no less!); hash browns; Mom's homemade bread with loads of butter & jam and whatever fresh fruit was in season. They could really put away the food, and both were lean and trim their entire lives. Oh, yes, I forgot about the bowl of hot oatmeal or hot cream of wheat they'd down while waiting on the rest of the meal to be cooked--nothing less than sugar & heavy cream to top that off, of course!

Yes, ma'm, the old cookbooks most definitely had larger sized portions way back when! Those were the days.

My sister's 18-year-old son is a runner, and when he's in training and jogging 15 miles every day, Donny eats roughly five to six thousand calories A DAY. My mom is forever remarking about how Donny eats like his grandfather (my dad) used to, and my dad never ran a day in his life for fun! Now running after cattle that had gotten loose, yes, but never for mere exercise.

To this day my mom (at 87) thinks walking and jogging are total time wasters because you are not getting any work done and are burning up energy for no good reason!

AngAk, I have another excellent biscuit shortcake recipe that was made in the same class as where my Pasta Primavera recipe came from (posted below). Ingredient amounts are nearly identical, but the instructor made 16 small biscuits out of her dough to serve the class that day. (I have that info jotted down in the margin of my notes.) My grandmother's recipe says Serves 6! I'll post the class shortcake recipe next as it was also very good--had a bit of cornmeal in it and called for buttermilk as the liquid.

 
REC for Cornmeal Biscuit Berry Shortcake--this was excellent!

CORNMEAL BISCUIT BERRY SHORTCAKE
(Recipe is from a class taught by Marie Huntington at Cooks & Company on March 28, 2002).

1-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
3 Tablespoons sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
8 Tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled, cut in small pieces
1/2 cup regular buttermilk (not low-fat)
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Sift together all dry ingredients. Place dry mixture and chilled butter pieces in large bowl. With pastry blender incorporate butter into flour mixture until it resembles coarse bread crumbs. (Marie pulsed together in a Cuisinart food processor using the steel blade.)

Add buttermilk and egg; stir quickly by hand to mix. Turn dough out onto floured board; knead briefly. Pat out into a sheet about 1" thick. Cut into desired shapes with lightly floured cutter. (Marie lightly floured a Sil-Pat sheet, turned the dough out onto it and kneaded the dough 3-4 times/turns before patting it down/out into a rectangle and cutting the dough into 16, yes, sixteen(!) small round biscuits.)

Bake biscuits on parchment or Silpat-covered sheet pan for 8 to 12 minutes until golden brown. Cut biscuits in half horizontally. Place bottoms on plate. Cover with berry mix (recipe below), including some of the juice. Top berries with a dollop of chantilly cream. Place biscuit on top of cream at angle. Garnish with mint leaf or lemon zest, if desired.

2 pints of mixed berries (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, red raspberries and golden raspberries)
1/2 cup sugar
Juice from 1/2 lemon
2 Tablespoons Grand Marnier liqueur

Sort, rinse and stem berries. Cut strawberries lengthwise into 2 or 4 pieces depending on size. Place berries in a large bowl; add sugar, lemon juice and Grand Marnier. Gently stir with rubber spatula and allow to macerate for at least 1/2 hour.

3/4 cup heavy cream
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat cream until soft peaks form; add sugar and vanilla. Beat until slightly stiff.

 
Instead of or in addition to the whipped cream, we made FRESH STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM to top

the Cornmeal Biscuit Berry Shortcakes so here is that recipe, too, from the same class==>

FRESH STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM

1-3/4 cups heavy cream
3 (3x1") strips fresh lemon zest
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar, divided
1 lb (3 cups) strawberries, trimmed and quartered
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Combine cream, zest, and salt in a heavy saucepan and bring just to a boil. Remove from heat and discard zest. Whisk eggs with 1/2 cup sugar in a bowl, then add hot cream in a slow stream, whisking constantly. Pour mixture back into saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly, until slightly thickened and an instant-read thermometer registers 170 degrees F. Do NOT boil!

Immediately pour custard through a fine sieve into a metal bowl (this is done to remove the egg 'tails'), then cool to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Chill, covered, at least until cold--2 hours minimum, and up to 1 day.

While custard is chilling, puree strawberries with remaining 1/4 cup sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Force through fine sieve to remove seeds. Stir into chilled custard. Chill again. Freeze chilled custard in ice cream maker following manufacturer's instructions, then transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden. Makes about 5 cups.

 
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