Short But Sweet: Shortcakes All Summer Long

Photos by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty

It isn’t particularly short. It’s not exactly cake. Like so many treasured American foods—apple pie, hot dogs, cornbread—strawberry shortcake is a puzzling mishmash of Old World techniques and New World ingredients that, at its best, somehow makes perfect sense. It’s not fancy, but it’s ours.

Why short? “Short” refers not to height but to the dough’s crumbly texture. A short dough is made with plenty of fat—the shortening—and baking powder or soda, and yields a tender crumb. Its origins are English and date back to at least the 17th century (via Mrs. Ann Blencowe, c. 1694: “Short Cakes Made at ye Bathe”) but the big juicy strawberries we know and love are New World natives, and strawberry shortcake as we know it—a split biscuit topped with fresh berries and whipped cream—is an American original.

James Beard, the 20th-century “dean of American cookery,” would make it best. Along with his friend and colleague Julia Child, Beard reached a generation of home cooks through their televisions and coaxed them away from convenience cooking, back toward the lost pleasure of fresh ingredients cooked from scratch. Like Child, his time in Europe influenced him, but Beard’s greatest inspiration was the shimmering variety of cuisines and ingredients here in this land. Beard traveled these United States with open-hearted curiosity, approaching American food democratically and with zeal.

An “unfussy bon vivant” in John Birdsall’s biography, “as much in love with a good club sandwich as he was with veal Oscar,” Beard was an early champion of farmers markets and seasonal eating because fresh food just tastes best. What better dessert to celebrate summer’s great bounty than strawberry shortcake: the simply perfect combination of crisp pastry, fresh fruit and sweet cream?

I searched the fat-spattered pages of my old copy of American Cookery, but didn’t find it. In more than 20 American cookbooks, Beard never published a strawberry shortcake recipe. Search for “strawberry shortcake” on the James Beard Foundation’s website and it’s not the first result, but it’s there.

The recipe comes from Beard’s formidable British-born mother Elizabeth Beard, a passionate and adventurous cook who passed her love of food on to her son. It’s a straightforward recipe: lightly sweetened biscuits, macerated berries and whipped cream, with one secret ingredient: mashed hard-boiled egg yolks added to the dough, yielding the tenderest possible crumb. It’s the best strawberry shortcake I’ve ever had.

Though he never published his mother’s recipe, Beard shared it with his friend and protégé Larry Forgione, chef-owner of An American Place. The dessert became a signature dish and remained on the menu until the restaurant’s 2010 closing: “Jim Beard’s Seasonal Fruit Shortcake, $8.00.”

In Forgione’s cookbook, An American Place, he famously recalled his friend lounging at his New York townhouse, saying of his mother’s recipe, “There can be no dessert better, only fancier.” There are summer days that call for a fancy cake, iced and piped and layered, but shortcakes aren’t for special occasions, they’re for making ordinary occasions special.

I barely touched the recipe. I have nothing to add. Like James Beard, so free of snobbery, they’re free of ornamentation— no pretense, no garnish. Just right. We could make aquafaba cream or almond flour biscuits, but that’s a different story. Here I want to honor something pure and good and not pretend that I could improve it in any way.

One of strawberry shortcake’s defining features is its uncooked strawberries, the raw fruit at its peak barely kissed by sugar. It celebrates a fleeting season—using imported out-of-season berries misses the point. If you want to stretch the season, or to have a little taste of June on a dreary winter day, go berry picking now and freeze some of your haul for later. Defrosted fresh-picked fruit is worlds better than anything you’d find at the supermarket. Or use the fruit that’s in season—substitute raspberries or blackberries in the latter half of summer.

For blueberries and peaches, I did make some tweaks. Even freshly picked blueberries work best with a little heat added. The dessert hangs together better, the sweet-tart balance improves. And to finish out the summer, peaches. Uncooked, but marinated with a little booze. You could skin them, but I wouldn’t bother.

Shortly after Beard’s death in 1985, Forgione made the shortcakes for a Meals-on-Wheels benefit given in his honor. “It is,” he says, “everything that Jim and America represent, a wonderfully rich biscuit that is overflowing with strawberries and country cream.”

A little ungainly, but sublime. It isn’t elegant, it’s better than that. Dig in.

This story appeared in the Summer 2021 issue.