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Scotch Short Bread
1 cup butter 1/2 cup powdered sugar 2 cups flour Cream the butter; add the flour and sugar; knead all together thoroughly with the hands; roll out about one inch in thickness and cut in oblong cakes. Bake about half an hour, laying the bread on brown paper in an unbuttered pan.
A three-ingredient shortbread, though the loose-leaf page has lost the first line of its ingredient list. Everything else is straightforward once you translate the paper and the oven.
- The missing butterThe instructions begin "cream the butter" but no quantity survives on this leaf. Shortbread of this era runs to a ratio of roughly 1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, 3 parts flour by weight; the 1/2 cup powdered sugar here is lighter than that, and against 2 cups flour the ratio would suggest somewhere between 3/4 and 1 cup of butter. Treat any figure as a reconstruction, not the original's.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, as was common when oven heat was judged by hand rather than dial. Shortbread is best baked slow, around 300-325F; at half an hour and one inch thick it should be pale straw, not brown. Hotter risks setting the outside before the centre cooks through.
- Brown paperUnbleached kitchen paper was the standard non-stick liner. Use parchment. The instruction to leave the pan unbuttered matters: the dough already carries all the fat it needs, and extra grease makes the bottoms fry.
- Powdered sugarNot necessarily today's confectioners' sugar: in books of this period "powdered" generally meant sugar milled or pounded finer than granulated, often nearer modern caster sugar, and without the cornstarch modern confectioners' sugar carries. Granulated will work but gives a slightly sandier, more open crumb.
- Kneading with the handsThis is deliberate and worth following. Hand warmth softens the butter enough to bring a very dry mixture together without added liquid; a mixer tends to whip air in, which makes shortbread puff and then crack.
- One inch is thickA full inch of shortbread needs the whole half hour and then some at 300F. Test by pressing the centre, which should feel firm rather than yielding. Cut the oblongs while the slab is still warm if you baked it as one piece; cold shortbread shatters.
- YieldWith the butter as reconstructed above, roughly 16 to 20 fingers depending on how you cut them. They keep a week in a tin and improve on the second day.
- Filed oddlyThe page is grouped under Frozen Desserts. Nothing in the recipe calls for chilling or freezing, and the reason for the placement is unclear.
Shortbread is traditionally traced to a medieval Scottish "biscuit bread" of twice-baked, butter-enriched bread dough from which the yeast eventually dropped out, though this account is more often repeated than documented; the "short" is the baker's term for fat that shortens gluten strands and produces a crumbly rather than chewy texture. By the time American cookbooks picked it up it had become a fixed three-ingredient exercise associated with Hogmanay and Christmas, and its appeal to a domestic-science-era compiler is obvious: it demonstrates, with nothing but butter, sugar and flour, exactly what fat does to a dough. Loose-leaf cookbooks came in during the early twentieth century, sold so a cook could add her own pages and rearrange the printed ones.