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Shortbread Cookies
2 1/2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Beat Crisco, sugar, and salt to cream. Add gradually egg well beaten, flour, and flavoring. Knead lightly on floured baking board, then roll out one-fourth inch thick and cut into small rounds. Mark them with fork, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven from ten to fifteen minutes. Sufficient for forty cookies.
A shortbread in name only — the egg and the vegetable shortening put it closer to a plain sugar cookie than to the Scottish original. It works, but it behaves differently from a butter dough.
- Moderate ovenIn this period "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F; the book itself gives no figures. The recipe allows ten to fifteen minutes for quarter-inch rounds; check at ten, when they should be pale with just a rim of colour. They firm as they cool.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since this book was written — the original was cottonseed oil, today's is soybean and palm. Butter at the same volume gives far more flavour, but butter contains water and browns faster, so watch the last two minutes.
- "Criscoed tins"Simply greased baking sheets. Parchment does the job with no fat at all.
- The dough will look too dryThere is no milk or water here, and 2 1/2 cups of flour against half a cup of fat and one egg makes a stiff, crumbly mass. Press it together rather than adding liquid; kneading it lightly on the board, as directed, is what brings it into a sheet.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but 20 minutes in the refrigerator makes a quarter-inch sheet far easier to roll and keeps the cut rounds from spreading.
- Marking with a forkThis is decorative and also docks the dough, letting steam escape so the rounds bake flat rather than doming.
- YieldForty cookies from this quantity means small rounds, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches across. A larger cutter will give proportionally fewer, and they may need slightly longer in the oven.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, and nearly every recipe in it is built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911. Promotional cookbooks of that era were one of the main ways a new industrial fat was taught to home cooks: the recipes are competent and conventional, and the only argument they make is that the product can stand in anywhere butter or lard once did. That is why a shortbread -- a biscuit whose identity in Scotland rests on butter, flour and sugar and little else -- appears here with shortening and an added egg. The name survives; the thing it named does not.