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Pitkaithley Bannock
Dry before the fire one pound of fine flour; then melt half a pound of butter, and mix it well with the flour. Add two ounces of almonds, blanched and thinly sliced, two ounces of candied orange-peel cut fine, two ounces of sugar, and the same of caraway comfits. Knead all well together, and bake for an hour in a slow oven. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
This is shortbread in its older, richer form: no liquid, no leavening, twice as much flour as butter, and only a token amount of sugar. The dough will look impossibly dry until the warmth of your hands brings it together.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven is usually taken as somewhere around 275-300F (140-150C). Shortbread this thick and rich will colour well before the centre sets if baked hotter; an hour at the lower end suits a single round of roughly 8 inches, pressed about three-quarters of an inch thick.
- Drying the flourWarming flour by the fire drove off moisture absorbed in a damp larder and made it easier to work with melted butter. Modern bagged flour is dry enough to skip this, though ten minutes in a low oven does no harm and makes the mixing quicker.
- Caraway comfitsThese were caraway seeds coated in hard sugar, sold by confectioners and now hard to find outside specialist suppliers. A scant teaspoon of caraway seed plus the equivalent sugar gives much the same flavour, though not the crunch; if caraway is not to your taste, extra candied peel will fill the gap.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds, sliced thin. Flaked almonds from a packet work, but slicing whole blanched nuts yourself gives the coarser shards the recipe intends.
- Bringing the dough togetherMelted butter and flour will look like damp sand. Knead it in the bowl and then on the board until it coheres, then press it into a round on a baking sheet rather than rolling; the dough is too short to roll without cracking. Pinch the edge, prick the top all over, and score the portions before baking.
- SweetnessTwo ounces of sugar to a pound of flour is far less than a modern shortbread, and the sweetness comes largely from the peel and comfits. If you want something closer to a current shortbread, the sugar can be increased, though the dough will slacken as you do.
- Yield and keepingOne pound of flour makes a single large bannock, twelve to sixteen wedges. Cool it completely on the sheet, since it is fragile while warm, and store it in a tin, where it improves over two or three days and keeps for a fortnight.
The name points to Pitcaithly, near Bridge of Earn in Perthshire, whose mineral wells drew visitors through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and gave the district enough fame for a local speciality to travel under its name. Bannock is an old Scots word for a flat round cake baked on a girdle or hearthstone, and the term stuck to this oven-baked shortbread long after the method changed; the round shape, pinched edge and pricked surface are what survive of the older form. Almonds and candied orange-peel mark it as a festive baking, and Pitcaithly bannock is generally associated with Christmas and Hogmanay, when a rich shortbread was offered to callers. Its appearance in a London reference work like Cassell's reflects the steady nineteenth-century appetite in England for named Scottish bakes, helped along by the biscuit trade that was industrialising shortbread at the same period.