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Scotch Shortbread
4 cupfuls flour. 3/4 cupful sugar. 1 cupful Crisco. 3/4 cupful Crisco 1 large egg 1 teaspoonful salt Sift flour and salt on to baking board. Cream Crisco, sugar and egg in basin and when thoroughly beaten turn out on board and very gradually knead in flour. Make into two smooth rounds, pinch them round the edges, prick over top with fork, lay on papered tin and bake in moderate.oven thirty-five minutes. Leave on tin until cold.
Sufficient for two round cakes. 1 cupful sugar ½ cupful Crisco 4 whites of eggs
The ingredient list on this page has been mangled in printing: flour is called for in the method but never quantified, and the last line (½ cupful Crisco, 4 whites of eggs) belongs to a neighbouring recipe. Read the method, not the list.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given, and we will not invent one. A dough of 1 cup fat, 1 cup sugar and 1 egg conventionally takes somewhere in the region of 3 to 3½ cups of flour, but you will have to judge by feel: it should knead into a stiff, barely tacky mass that holds a fork print.
- The stray lineThe printed page does carry "½ cupful Crisco / 4 whites of eggs" beside this recipe; the lines belong to the neighbouring recipe on the page, not to the shortbread. Work only from the Crisco, egg, salt, sugar and flour named in the method.
- Moderate ovenTake it as about 350F (period "moderate" covers roughly 350-375F). Thirty-five minutes at that temperature suits two rounds about ½ inch thick; they should be pale straw, not browned, with just a little colour at the pinched edge.
- CriscoModern shortening has been reformulated to reduce trans fat, but works the same way here. Butter gives a better shortbread flavour, though it browns faster and spreads more; the whole point of the original was to demonstrate that the new vegetable fat could stand in.
- Cream it properlyThis is the hinge. Beat the fat, sugar and egg until genuinely light before any flour goes in, then work the flour in gradually and stop as soon as it coheres. Overworking after the flour toughens the crumb.
- Papered tinA flat baking sheet lined with parchment. Score each round into wedges before baking if you want clean petticoat tails; cut through while still warm, but leave the rounds on the tin until fully cold or they break.
- YieldTwo round cakes; the recipe gives no size, and with the flour unquantified the diameter will depend on how stiff a dough you end up with.
Traditional Scotch shortbread is a three-ingredient business — butter, sugar, flour — and the whole egg here suggests an American adaptation rather than a Scottish one. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to promote the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it had introduced in 1911, and its recipe section exists to prove the product could replace butter and lard across the whole range of domestic baking. Shortbread was a shrewd choice for that argument: the name is generally taken to refer to the "shortening" effect of a high proportion of fat, which prevents gluten strands from forming long chains and yields a crumb that snaps rather than stretches. Putting a vegetable fat into the one cake that is named for fat was a demonstration piece. The book is credited to Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, and the pinched edge and fork-pricked top described here are old Scottish practice, whatever the filling of the tin.