Home › Bread › Scotch Shortbread
Scotch Shortbread
1 lb. Gold Medal flour 1/4 lb. light brown sugar 1/2 lb: butter 1 tablespoon caraway seed Mix flour and butter together with hands, then add sugar and seeds mixed, knead the paste smooth, roll out one-half inch thick and cut in oblong cakes. Prick all over and bake in moderate oven one-half hour. Griddle Cakes, No. 1 2 cups Gold Medal flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 1/2 cups milk 2 eggs 1/4 cup melted butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk and beaten eggs. Beat well. Add the butter, beat again and bake by spoonfuls on a hot griddle. Griddle Cakes, No. 2 2 cups Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups sour milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 eggs Mix the dry ingredients, add milk slowly, beaten eggs, and beat; add melted butter, beat again, and drop by spoonfuls on hot griddle. One-half graham and one-third corn meal may be substituted. They should cook more slowly.
Add 1 pint of huckleberries cleaned and rolled in flour, or 1 cup peaches cut fine and laid in sugar for an hour, or cherries stewed sweet and drained. When eggs are scarce reduce the number of eggs, diminish the amount of milk and increase the amount of beating.
A true shortbread in the old proportion — flour, butter, sugar and nothing else to lift it — followed on the same page by two griddle cake batters. Weigh the ingredients if you can; the ratios are the whole recipe.
- The weights in cups1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, 1/2 lb butter is two sticks, and 1/4 lb light brown sugar is roughly 1/2 cup packed. Volume measuring of a pound of flour is where this dough most often goes wrong; a scale removes the guesswork.
- Butter temperature is the hingeRubbing 1/2 lb of butter into 1 lb of flour by hand only works if the butter is cool and pliable, not soft or greasy. Work it until the mixture looks like damp sand, then add the sugar; overworked warm butter gives a tough, oily biscuit.
- Moderate ovenGenerally read as 350-375F; the lower end, around 325-350F, suits this dough. At the lower end the shortbread dries and pales rather than browning, which is what you want — colour past golden means the butter has begun to fry.
- Half an inch is thickAt that thickness the stated half hour may be the minimum, so judge by colour rather than the clock. The docking holes are structural, not decorative — they let steam out so the slabs stay flat.
- No salt, and no leaveningThe recipe presumably assumes salted butter, which was common in households of the period. With unsalted butter add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt or the shortbread tastes flat and sweet-heavy.
- CarawayA whole tablespoon in a pound of flour is assertive by current taste. It is authentic to the older British seed-cake tradition, but half that amount, or a swap to a caraway-free version, is a reasonable liberty.
- Yield and coolingAbout 1 3/4 lb of dough by the listed weights, giving perhaps two dozen fingers. Cut the oblongs before baking but leave them on the sheet until fully cool — hot shortbread is fragile and will break at the edges.
- The sour milk in Griddle Cakes No. 2"Sour milk" means naturally clabbered raw milk, which pasteurised milk will not reproduce. Buttermilk is the working substitute, and it is what makes the teaspoon of soda function.
- The grain substitutions"One-half graham and one-third corn meal" is loose printing — read it as replacing part of the white flour with either whole-wheat or cornmeal. Both absorb more liquid and, as the book says, need a slower griddle so the centre sets before the outside colours.
Shortbread belongs to the Scottish baking tradition of enriched, unleavened doughs, generally traced to medieval twice-baked biscuit bread that grew richer as butter became cheaper than it once had been; against the classic ratio of one part sugar, two parts butter, three parts flour, this version — four parts flour to two of butter and one of sugar — is leaner in butter as well as sugar. Caraway seed was standard in British seed cakes and biscuits well into the nineteenth century and reads as old-fashioned now only because the spice fell out of sweet baking. Its presence in a Minneapolis flour-milling company's promotional cookbook says something about the audience: Gold Medal was selling a hard spring-wheat flour to households across the country, and the books gathered whatever the immigrant and inherited repertoire contained — Scotch shortbread, sour-milk griddle cakes, huckleberry batters — under the assumption that one branded flour would serve them all.