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Bread, Short
To one pound and a half of flour add the following ingredients:--a quarter of a pound of candied orange and lemon-peel, cut small; the same of sweet almonds, blanched and cut; loaf sugar, and caraway comfits (some of the latter may be kept to strew over the top of the bread). Dissolve a pound of butter, and when it is getting cool pour it into the flour, and mix it quickly into a dough, with half a pound more flour. Then pour it into a large round cake of an inch in thickness; divide it into four parts, and pinch the edge of each piece neatly with the thumb and finger; strew the caraway comfits over the top, with small devices of orange-or citron-peel. Lay the cakes on floured paper, which is again to be placed upon tins, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, twenty-five to thirty minutes. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
A rich Victorian shortbread in the Scottish manner, scored into four wedges and studded with caraway comfits. The dough is worked with melted butter rather than creamed, which changes how it must be handled.
- The hinge: melted butter, worked fastThe butter goes in "getting cool" and the dough is mixed "quickly" — the warmth of the butter appears to be what brings two pounds of flour together with no egg or liquid. Let it cool too far and it will be harder to bring together, so have the flour, peel and almonds all measured and waiting.
- Total flourA pound and a half at the start, then half a pound more when the butter goes in: 2 lb (about 7 cups) in all, to 1 lb butter. That is a 2:1 flour-to-butter ratio.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe recipe gives a quarter pound each of mixed candied peel and almonds, then lists "loaf sugar, and caraway comfits" with no amount at all. A quarter pound of sugar and the same of comfits is consistent with the pattern, but the original genuinely does not say.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard refined cone to be broken and crushed at home. Use granulated, or caster for a finer crumb.
- Caraway comfitsCaraway seeds coated in successive layers of hard sugar, once a standard confectioner's line and now almost impossible to buy. Caraway seeds tossed in coarse sugar give the flavour, though not the crunch; plain caraway seeds work if you want the taste alone.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as around 350F. At 25 to 30 minutes the cakes should be pale straw at the centre and just colouring at the pinched edges.
- Floured paper on tinsThis is the period's answer to a non-stick surface. Baking parchment on a heavy sheet does the same job, and the paper also lets you slide the fragile round off without breaking it.
- Shaping and yieldWork it into one round about an inch thick, then divide it into four before baking; the recipe speaks of laying "the cakes" on the paper, so they are separated. The full quantity is a large batch — over three pounds of dough — giving four substantial wedges that each serve several people. Halving it is sensible for a domestic oven.
- CoolingLeave the wedges on the paper until cold. Hot shortbread of this richness has no structure and will break along the score lines.
This is shortbread in its older festive dress: a single thick round divided into four, pinched at the rim, and dressed with candied peel and caraway comfits ermpetticoat tails, a name often said to come from the shape of the pieces cut from a bell-hooped skirt, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. Caraway comfits were a long-standing fixture of British sweet baking, sugar-panned seeds being among the few decorative sugars a household could buy ready-made, and they appear in seed cakes and biscuits well into the Victorian period before falling out of use. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later nineteenth century, prices the recipe at 3s 6d he ppound of butter, the almonds and the imported candied peel, which marks this as celebration baking rather than everyday tea-table fare.