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Royal Fans
Mix and sift two cups flour and one-half cup brown sugar. Wash three-fourths cup butter and work into first mixture, using tips of fingers. Roll to one-third inch in thickness, shape with a fluted round cutter five inches in diameter. Cut each piece in quarters and crease with the dull edge of a case knife to represent folds of a fan. Brush over with yolk of egg diluted with three-fourths teaspoon water. Bake in a slow oven. 1 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 3 eggs 1 teaspoon soda
A rich, sugar-light shortbread rolled thick, cut into quarter-circles and scored to look like a folded fan. Two things need saying before you begin: the oven is cooler than you would guess, and the four lines of ingredients printed at the end do not belong to this recipe.
- The stray ingredient listThe "1 cup butter, 1½ cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1 teaspoon soda" at the foot does not match the method above it and appears to be a stray fragment of an adjacent recipe. It has no place in Royal Fans; the dough is only flour, brown sugar and butter, with a yolk for glazing.
- Slow ovenNo temperature is given; "slow oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 300-325F. These are shortbread, and the point of the low heat is to dry them through to a pale sandy crumb without browning the edges. Expect roughly half an hour for third-inch rounds, but go by colour: they should stay blond and feel firm at the centre when pressed.
- "Wash the butter"An instruction for butter of the period, which was often salty and wet: it was kneaded under cold water to rinse out brine and buttermilk, then pressed dry. With modern unsalted butter, skip it entirely. Use the butter cool but pliable, and rub it into the flour with fingertips as directed rather than creaming it.
- Case knifeA table knife. Any dull-backed knife or the edge of a bench scraper will do for pressing the fan pleats. Press firmly enough to leave a visible groove without cutting through, since the lines shallow out as the dough spreads slightly.
- Cutter sizeA 5-inch fluted round is larger than most modern cutter sets go; an overturned bowl or a saucer traced with a knife works, and a fluted edge is decorative rather than structural. Each round yields four fans, so a fluted-rim ramekin lid or a large biscuit cutter around 4 inches also gives a good result on a slightly smaller scale.
- Handling the doughWith no egg or liquid in the dough it will feel crumbly and short. Press it together rather than kneading it, and chill the cut fans for 15 minutes before glazing if your kitchen is warm, or the pleat marks will slump.
- The glazeOne yolk with three-quarters of a teaspoon of water is a thin wash, brushed on for gloss and a faint tan. Apply it sparingly with a soft brush; a heavy coat will pool in the creases and set into hard shiny ridges.
- YieldTwo cups of flour and three-quarters cup butter makes roughly 500 g of dough, or about 16 to 20 fans depending on cutter size. They keep well in a tin for a week and, like all shortbread, improve on the second day.
Royal Fans belong to the long line of Victorian and Edwardian "fancy biscuits" — plain shortbread doughs given a shape and a flattering name for the tea table rather than any change in ingredients. The whole method here is Scottish shortbread: flour, sugar and butter, no egg, no leavening, baked slowly so the sugar never caramelises. Cutting a large round into quarters and scoring the pleats is the same economy of effort that produces shortbread "petticoat tails," a name whose origin is disputed — often traced to pleated petticoats, though a derivation from the French petites gatelles is also cited. Fannie Farmer's chapter of gingerbreads, cookies and wafers is full of these small decorative exercises, and they reflect the Boston Cooking School's belief that a cook trained in a handful of basic doughs could ring endless changes on them with nothing more than a cutter and a table knife.