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Scotch Shortbread
3/4 cup Mazola 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar, powdered or 1/2 brown 1/2 cup Argo or Kingsford's 1½ cups flour Cornstarch 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg Sift the dry ingredients and rub in the Mazola with the hands. Work until the dough is smooth and fine grained. Lightly oil a layercake pan with Mazola and line with thin paper. Pack Paper in the shortbread mixture, pressing down the edges with a fork to form a design. Decorate the center with a "flower" made of blanched almonds, candied cherries, and leaves and a stem of citron, and bake in a slow oven, 350 degrees F., from thirty-five to forty-five minutes. Cut in small wedge-shaped pieces and remove from the pan.
This is a corn-products company's version of shortbread, with oil standing in for butter and cornstarch for part of the flour. The ingredient list has come through with some garbled numbers, so read it carefully before measuring.
- The sugar quantity is unreliable"2 cup sugar, powdered or 1/2 brown" is a garbled line; the intended figure was probably around half a cup, since two cups of sugar against a cup and a half of flour would not hold together as shortbread. Treat the printed figure with caution and adjust to taste.
- Mazola means corn oilMazola was and is a refined corn oil. Any neutral vegetable oil behaves the same way here. Because there is no butter, the mixture will feel more like damp sand than a creamed dough, though the recipe expects it to be worked until smooth and fine grained.
- Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarchBoth were brand names of the same company's cornstarch. Half a cup of cornstarch to one and a half cups of flour is a high proportion and is what gives this its short, powdery crumb — it is the point of the recipe, not a substitution.
- "Slow oven, 350 degrees F." is a contradictionPeriod tables vary, but a slow oven is generally reckoned below 350F, commonly somewhere around 300-325F, with 350F counted as moderate. Shortbread of this kind does better at the lower end, so it dries out rather than colours. At 350F check at thirty minutes.
- Press, do not rollThere is no liquid and no egg in the dough. It is packed into the pan by hand and compacted with a fork; the pressure is what makes it cohere, so press firmly and evenly or the edges will crumble away when cut.
- Score before baking, cut while warmCut while warm -- the recipe cuts the wedges after baking and lifts them out; do this while the slab is still warm, as shortbread of this composition is apt to shatter once cold.
- Lining paper"thin paper" is presumably plain unwaxed paper rather than anything greased or waxed; parchment does the job. The recipe does not give a pan size, but a standard 8- or 9-inch round layer cake pan would give roughly twelve to sixteen small wedges.
- The decorationCitron here is candied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle around the winter holidays and otherwise hard to find; candied lemon peel stands in for the leaves and stem. Press the almonds and cherries well down into the surface or they will lift off the baked slab.
Scotch shortbread is traditionally three ingredients — butter, sugar, flour — sometimes with rice flour or cornflour worked in for a sandier texture, and its formal, fork-crimped, wedge-cut round is traditionally said to descend from the old Scottish bannock. What makes this version worth a second look is that it contains no butter at all. Cookbooks like this one were published by manufacturers to demonstrate their products: Mazola corn oil and the Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch brands all belonged to the Corn Products Refining Company, and the recipe appears designed to show that a famously butter-dependent biscuit could be made with corn oil instead. The cornstarch, meanwhile, is doing the job that rice flour or cornflour does in Scottish practice, which is the one genuinely traditional thing about the formula.