Shortbread, Scotch
INGREDIENTS for 6 good-sized cakes. -2 lbs. of flour, 1 lb. of butter, 1/4 lb. of pounded loaf sugar, oz. of caraway seeds, 1 oz. of sweet almonds, a few strips of candied orange-peel. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
Beat the butter to a cream, gradually dredge in the flour, and add the sugar, caraway seeds and sweet almonds, which SHORTBREAD. should be blanched and cut into small pieces. Work the paste until it is quite smooth, and divide it into six pieces. Put each cake on a separate piece of paper, roll the paste out square to the thickness of about an inch, and pinch it upon all sides.
Prick it well, and ornament with one or two strips of candied orange-peel. Put the SHRIMP SAUCE.
SKATE, CRIMPED. cakes into a good oven and bake them from simmer gently for 3 minutes. Serve on a 25 to 30 minutes.
TIME.-25 to 30 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. Where the flavour of the caraway seeds is disliked, omit them, and add rather a larger proportion of candied peel.
Shrimp Sauce (for Various Kinds of Fish). INGREDIENTS for sauce for small dish of fish. pint of melted butter, pint of picked shrimps, cayenne to taste. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Make the melted butter very smoothly, shell the shrimps (sufficient to make pint when picked), and put them into the butter; season with cayenne and let the sauce just simmer, but do not allow it to boil. When liked, a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce may be added.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer.
Shrimps or Prawns, To Boil.
INGREDIENTS. lb. of salt to each gallon of water. AVERAGE COST, prawns, Is. per dozen; shrimps, 4d. per pint.
Prawns should be very red, and have no spawn under the tail; much depends on their freshness and the way in which they are cooked. Throw them into boiling water, salted as above, and keep them poiling for about 7 or 8 minutes. Shrimps should be done in the same way: but less time should be allowed. It may easily be THE SHRIMP. known when they are done by their changing colour. Care should be taken that they are not over boiled, as they then become tasteless and indigestible.
TIME. - Prawns, about 8 minutes; shrimps, about 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Shrimps or Prawns, Buttered. --INGREDIENTS. -1 pint of picked prawns or shrimps, pint of stock, thickening of butter and flour; salt, cayenne and nutmeg to taste. AVERAGE COST, with prawns, 5s.; with shrimps, 1s. 3d.
Pick the prawns or shrimps, and put them in a stewpan with the stock; add a thickoning of butter and flour: season and dish garnished with fried bread or toasted sippets. Cream sauce may be substituted for the gravy.
TIME.-3 minutes.
A very large Victorian batch — six square cakes from two pounds of flour. The proportions are leaner in butter and much leaner in sugar than most modern shortbread, so the handling matters more than the baking.
- The hinge: work it, don't wet itThe paste is held together by butter alone, and at 2 lb flour to 1 lb butter it will look hopelessly dry at first. Keep working and pressing it until it comes smooth; adding water or egg to speed things up turns shortbread into biscuit.
- Scale it downSix cakes of this size is a household or shop quantity. A sixth of the recipe — 5-1/3 oz flour, 2-2/3 oz butter, a scant 3/4 oz sugar — gives one cake, and the method is unchanged.
- SugarPounded loaf sugar is sugar broken from a cone and crushed fine; caster sugar is the closest modern equivalent. A quarter pound to two pounds of flour is barely sweet by current taste, and you may want to increase it.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperatures; read this as a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F (160-180C), and expect the lower end for a cake an inch thick. The 25-30 minutes may be optimistic at that thickness; bake until the surface is pale straw and the edges just colour, and if it is browning before the centre sets, drop the heat.
- Paper and the pinched edgeThe separate paper is a baking sheet liner — use parchment, and bake on a flat tray. Pinching the sides with finger and thumb is the traditional finish, and may also help firm the rim of a thick, short paste.
- PrickingPrick right through to the paper, and fairly closely. A cake this thick left unpricked is more likely to blister or crack.
- Caraway and almondsThe caraway quantity in the text has lost its fraction and cannot be read reliably; for this amount of flour, two to three teaspoons is a sane starting point, and the note tells you to leave it out and add more peel if the flavour is unwelcome. The sweet almonds are blanched (skinned in hot water) and chopped small, not ground.
- CoolingCut or score the cake while it is still hot and soft, then leave it on the tray to firm. Moved too early it breaks; left whole and cold it will not cut cleanly.
Shortbread is conventionally traced to the older family of "biscuit breads" — enriched, twice-baked or slow-baked cakes made from bread dough with butter worked in — and is generally said to have settled in Scotland by the eighteenth century as a festive baking, particularly at Hogmanay and for Yule. The thick square or round cake with a pinched, notched rim is the traditional form, and the notching is often said to represent the rays of the sun, though that reading is folklore rather than documented fact. Caraway marks one Victorian variant: caraway comfits and seed cakes were staples of nineteenth-century British baking, and Mrs Beeton's note allows the seeds to be dropped in favour of extra candied peel.