Short on Shortcake or the Triumph of the Stove

I have two friends who have recently formed their own Cook’s Illustrated alliance. That is, they are cooking in search of the best recipe for... whatever. One week it was for a galette (which later morphed into quiche) and another it was for vegetable stock. Both are wonderful cooks but different in temperament. Nicola is an artist by training and profession. She loves the details. Once she gave me a chocolate chip cookie recipe. I made it with lots of substitutions because I couldn’t be bothered to get the exact sugar she recommended or let the dough sit for the exact amount of time. The cookies came out good but not great, definitely not like hers. When I told her about the substitutions, she was aghast. I had just committed heresy in the Church of Saints Butter, Eggs and Flour. She excommunicated me, telling me she would never give me another recipe as she could not trust me to follow it AS IT WAS WRITTEN. And, yes, she did use capital letters when she wrote me this, just as I am sure Moses did when he was carving out the Commandments. My other friend, Beatrice, is a bit more like me in temperament in that she doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Well, at least she didn’t before she went to the Cordon Bleu. Now she is into measuring and weighing. She even got drawer organizers when, for ten years prior, the whisks and spoons and graters and ravioli molds all lay together in a tangled mess of steel cuneiform. Anyone who doubts the life-changing impact of education clearly has not been schooled at the Cordon Bleu. Beatrice was always an amazing cook but now she has become a chef by anyone’s account.

So, last week, Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice decided to test shortcake recipes for strawberry shortcake. Even though I’m not much of a shortcake fan—-too dry, too bready, just gimme the whipped cream—-I went over to see what these two kitchen sisters were all about. Cookbooks crowded the countertop, kitchen island, and dining room table, each opened to a shortcake recipe (and, unaccountably, a Pavlova recipe?). Nicola was bent over some pages, her glasses perched at the end of her nose, her gaze unwavering--she reminded me of an apothecary concentrating on the formulation of a secret elixir. Beatrice was already rolling and cutting her first batch of biscuits made following the Tartine recipe. Zoe, Nicola’s daughter and baking novitiate, was reading a Dorie Greenspan recipe aloud while her boyfriend Steve ceremoniously emptied the dry ingredients--plop!poof!-- into a stainless steel bowl as each powdery substance was intoned.

Daunted by all this baking, I busied myself with cleaning up. All those measuring cups and measuring spoons! Sheesh. Flour everywhere. Not a knife or a sauté pan to be seen. (As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I am not a chef. I cook, yes. Sometimes pretty well. But really my forte is the eating department.) I was a bit unsure of how to make myself useful amidst all that cutting, rolling, flouring, oven-opening-and-closing. Then Chef Beatrice mentioned that the Tartine recipe had a caramel sauce that went with the shortcake. Music to my ears! Butter, sugar, heavy cream and a stovetop, you say? I’m there, baby. You don’t really think I would enter into the competitive foray of shortcake making, do you? Unh, unh. Do the thing no-one else is doing, do it relatively well and you are, like the caramel, golden.

After multiple batches made from four recipes—Michael Mina’s, Edna Lewis’, Tartine’s and Dorie Greenspan’s—we sat down to evaluate. (Oh, did I mention I also made a strained berry sauce of blackberries and strawberries flavored with drizzle of balsamic vinegar and a splash of Cointreau? Again, done at the stovetop; no measuring spoons were de-nestled for the making of this.)
We all had a different favorite depending if we were looking more for flavor from the shortcake or a particular texture to go with the berries and cream. We decided the Edna Lewis biscuit really needed to be slathered with honey butter (or the Apricot Vanilla Butter from June Taylor) rather than serve as the stage for berries. (Aside: have you noticed how often "slathered" is used to describe butter on a biscuit? And rightly so...) The Tartine shortcake was the hit flavor-wise; it's the one we could have eaten on its own, though Chef Beatrice also really liked the Michael Mina recipe for that. A few of us put the Dorie Greenspan dropped (rather than rolled out) shortcake recipe to the top of our list as its crumbly texture and crunchy tops provided a nice foil to the loftiness of the cream and juice of the berries. There was, as Chef Beatrice noted, no clear winner. Well, not with the shortcakes, anyway.

One thing everyone agreed on: the caramel sauce was the best.

Sometimes you don’t need to go with four recipes. Just do one and execute really well. No-one will even bother going to look for the competition.