Published May 1, 1997.
For a light, rich, cakelike biscuit, add an egg and use just enough rich milk to bind the dough.
The question was how to make it. We also wanted to make sure we had a juicy complement of strawberries to ladle over the shortcake.
Cakes and other pastries just don't offer the contrast of cool strawberries sandwiched between warm, tender-crisp biscuit halves and chilled whipped cream. While some cooks like to spoon strawberries over pound cake, sponge cake, and even angel food cake, our idea of strawberry shortcake definitely involves a biscuit.
We decided to go with an egg-enriched biscuit, which, though still very much a biscuit, was finer-textured and more cakelike than other types we'd tried. With our shortcake in place, we now needed to add the strawberries. While we wanted juiciness from the berries, we didn't want juice only--that is, entirely crushed berries. But neither did we want dry chunks of fruit falling off the biscuit and onto the plate. Our solution was a compromise: Preserve the shape of some berries by quartering them and release the juice of the others by mashing them.
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