On a Sunday night in June, you are required, by cosmic law, to make strawberry shortcake. I don’t know if you knew that. I just found out. There’s apparently a similar law for July, only it governs tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. You’ve been warned.

Last week, we had two friends visiting from Scotland. Whenever we have visitors, I tend to want to take them to lots of restaurants, because that seems like the best way to show them our city, but when jet lag is involved, it feels mean to force anyone to sit upright or speak in complete sentences after approximately mid-afternoon. So on Sunday night, after a morning visit to the farmer’s market and a long walk down to Golden Gardens, past a cluster of plastic flamingos and a creepy guy digging for sand worms and back up the hill again, we decided to stay home. Our friends shelled peas and opened a bottle of wine, and I washed arugula, put on a pot of water for pasta, and got some sauce going.

While the pots were warming, I started thinking about the strawberries we had bought that morning, the first ones to show up this summer. Seattle is always slow to get its local summer fruits and vegetables, but this year has felt especially late – like, trains-in-Italy late. Now that we’ve actually got strawberries, I wanted to do right by them. I wanted to do something special, something celebratory, but I didn’t want it to be too special, to get in the way of tasting the fruit. And that, I think, is a pretty good way to describe shortcake.

When I was a kid, in Oklahoma, most people bought their shortcakes: the packaged kind from the grocery store, sealed in noisy plastic wrappers, yellow and spongy, shaped like large, concave hockey pucks – or maybe they were more like saucers? Deep saucers? Shallow ashtrays? Anyway, my mother refused to buy them. Instead, she baked her shortcakes from scratch, shoulder to shoulder in a 9”-x-13” pan, cooled and cut apart and sandwiched with whipped cream and strawberries macerated with sugar. But that was years ago, and when I asked her what recipe she used, she said she doesn’t remember. She said it was probably something from Martha Stewart, but she didn’t sound confident about it. We’ll never know. I was on my own.

The version I was after would not be spongy, but more like my mother’s, more like a biscuit. I like my shortcakes very tender, crumbly, and flaky – but more crumbly than flaky, ideally. I like the crumb very short and slightly sweet, and the top should be riddled with crags and lumps. The thin, outermost crust should be a little crisp at the edges, and when you stick a fork in, the crumb should yield with a quiet whoosh. That’s important.

So, Sunday night, I scoured my shelves, and I wound up settling on a recipe from Dorie Greenspan, my longtime hero when it comes to sweets, and her book Baking. She calls the recipe “Tender Shortcakes,” and that about nails it. I knew right away that I wanted to tell you about them.

There’s nothing inventive or even terribly blog-worthy about a classic strawberry shortcake, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every day. This blog is the place where I record my best stuff, and Dorie’s is the best shortcake I’ve ever had. Not only would I happily eat it on its own – on its own and, hell, maybe even a week stale! That’s true love – but it uses very basic ingredients, the kind I always have around: flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, butter, and cream. It also comes together like lightning, with no need for floured countertops, rolling pins, or cookie cutters. As nice desserts go, it’s pretty close to instant. This one’s coming with me into July.