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Scotch Shortbread (No. 1)
1 pound Five Roses flour 2 ounces sugar (sifted) 1 ounce candied peel (sliced small) 8 ounces butter (more or less).
Mix the flour and sugar together, and add the candied peel. Make into a paste with 8 to 10 ounces of good butter sufficiently warm to be liquid. Press the paste together with the hands and mould upon tins into large cakes nearly 1 inch thick.
Pinch the edges and bake the shortbread in a moderately warm oven for 20 minutes or longer if it should not be crisp, but do not allow it to become deeply colored.
A very lean shortbread by modern standards — barely sweet, and bound with melted rather than creamed butter. The proportions are given by weight, which is the easiest part of it to follow: use a scale.
- Weights, converted1 lb flour is about 450 g, or roughly 3½ cups scooped and levelled. 2 oz sugar is a generous ¼ cup; 8 oz butter is two sticks, and the recipe explicitly allows up to 10 oz (2½ sticks) if the dough will not come together.
- Butter ratioAt 8 oz butter to 16 oz flour this is leaner than most modern shortbread, which tends to run nearer 2 parts butter to 3 parts flour by weight. The recipe allows up to 10 oz; the dough should hold a squeezed shape without crumbling apart.
- Melted, not creamed"Sufficiently warm to be liquid" means just melted and no hotter; let it cool until it is barely warm to the finger before it goes in.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number; "moderately warm" points to a moderate oven, somewhere around 300–325°F. Shortbread is dried out as much as baked, and the instruction not to let it colour deeply is the point — pale gold at the edges, no more.
- TimingTwenty minutes is unlikely to be enough for a cake nearly an inch thick, and the recipe itself allows "longer"; it may well want twice that. Judge by colour and by a dry, matte surface rather than by feel.
- Add saltThe recipe adds no salt and calls only for "good butter"; salted butter was commonly used in baking of the period. With unsalted butter, add up to a teaspoon of fine salt to the flour, or the shortbread will taste flat.
- Dock the topNot mentioned, but prick the rounds all over with a fork before baking; it is usual for shortbread and helps a cake this thick bake evenly without blistering.
- Candied peelOne ounce is about 2 tablespoons, chopped fine. Buy whole candied citron or orange peel and cut it yourself; the pre-diced supermarket mix is mostly sugar syrup and turns to sticky spots in the crumb.
- Cooling and yieldCut it into wedges or fingers while still warm on the tin, then leave it there until cold — it is fragile hot. The dough is enough for one large round nearly an inch thick, or two thinner ones.
Shortbread's ancestry is usually traced to medieval biscuit bread, twice-baked leftover dough enriched over time with butter until the yeast dropped away entirely, and it was long a festival food in Scotland — Hogmanay, weddings, and the round cake pinched at the edges to suggest the sun's rays, an association often repeated though hard to document. The candied peel here is a mark of the older, dressier version: before shortbread became an everyday tin biscuit it was a celebration cake, studded with peel, caraway comfits or almonds. It appears in the Five Roses Cook Book, a milling-company promotional volume distributed across Canada, which carries a second shortbread recipe alongside it.