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SHORT BREAD, SCOTCH (another way)
Put two pounds of butter in some warm place overnight where it will gradually become soft without at the same time melting. Take two quarterns of flour, and mix with it half a pound of loaf sugar in powder, and lemon-peel and blanched sweet almonds (in quantities according to taste) cut very fine; add all these to the butter, and knead the whole till it appears like dough; then add a table-spoonful or two of yeast; again knead it, and roll out into cakes of the proper size and thickness. Ornament the edges with candied-lemon and comfits, having previously pricked the cakes with a fork.
A large Victorian batch scaled for a household baking day, with quantities given in units that no longer appear on a bag of flour. The proportions as printed also need a second look before you commit two pounds of butter to them.
- Two quarterns of flourA quartern of flour is usually a quarter of a stone, or 3½ lb, which makes this roughly 7 lb of flour to 2 lb of butter. That is far drier than any workable shortbread, and the word was used loosely enough in Victorian kitchens that the intended amount is genuinely uncertain. Treat the butter as the fixed quantity and work to the classic ratio of two parts flour to one part butter by weight — about 4 lb flour here, or scale the whole thing down to 8 oz butter and 1 lb flour for a single pan.
- Loaf sugar in powderLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold as a hard cone and broken off as needed; pounded in a mortar it gave what we buy as caster or superfine sugar. Use caster sugar, not granulated, which leaves a gritty crumb in a dough this short.
- The butter is the whole methodSoftened overnight but never melted is the instruction that matters. Butter soft enough to work but still cool will bind the flour into a paste with no water at all; melted butter makes a greasy dough that spreads and bakes hard.
- The yeast is vestigialA tablespoon or two of yeast in several pounds of unliquided, sugared, butter-heavy dough will not raise anything, and there is no proving time given. It is often explained as a survival from the older enriched bannock, though that line of descent is tradition rather than documented fact. Leave it out; nothing is lost.
- Sweet almonds"Sweet" is specified to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which older books also sold for flavouring. Use ordinary blanched almonds, chopped fine — about 2 oz per pound of flour is a reasonable reading of "according to taste."
- ComfitsSugar-shelled seeds, most often caraway, used as we would use nonpareils or sprinkles. Caraway comfits are still sold by confectioners; coloured sugar pearls give the same look.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 325 to 350F. A round about ½ inch thick takes 30 to 40 minutes and should be pale gold, not brown; the forked pricking is what stops it doming.
- YieldEven at the reduced scale of 1 lb flour this gives two rounds of about 8 inches, cut into wedges — twelve to sixteen pieces. Keep in a tin; the flavour improves after a day.
Shortbread is often traced to the Scottish tradition of enriched festival bannocks, and this recipe still shows the seam: the yeast, the candied peel and the comfits are all suggestive of a leavened celebration bread rather than of the plain butter biscuit shortbread later became. Cassell's, compiling in the 1870s and 80s for a British middle-class readership, gives several versions under the same heading. Shortbread was long associated with Hogmanay and with weddings, where a decorated round was often broken over the bride's head, a custom generally traced to older Scottish bride-cake practice rather than to any documented single origin.