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Shortbread Cookies
2 1/2 cupfuls flour. 1/2 cupful Crisco. 1/2 cupful sugar. 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Beat Crisco, sugar, and salt to cream. Add gradually egg well beaten, flour, and flavoring. Knead lightly on floured baking board, then roll out one-fourth inch thick and cut into small rounds. Mark them with fork, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven from ten to fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for forty cookies
A plain rolled cookie from Procter & Gamble's 1913 promotional book, written to prove that vegetable shortening could stand in for butter. Note that the ingredient list as printed here is incomplete.
- Missing quantitiesThe transcription opens mid-list: the salt, egg and vanilla survive but the amounts of Crisco, sugar and flour do not. Comparable shortbread-style cookies of the period run roughly 1/2 cup fat, 1 cup sugar and 2 to 2 1/2 cups flour, but that is inference, not what the book says. Work from a current recipe if you want reliable proportions.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken today as about 350F, though the book gives no temperature. Thin quarter-inch rounds should take the stated ten to fifteen minutes; pull them when the edges just colour, since they firm considerably as they cool.
- "Criscoed tins"Simply greased baking sheets. Parchment does the job with less fuss and prevents the sugary edges from sticking.
- Crisco itselfThe product still exists but has been reformulated more than once, most significantly to remove partially hydrogenated oil. How the current fat compares in firmness with the 1913 version is not something that can be established, so expect to adjust chilling and handling by feel.
- Not true shortbreadScottish shortbread is fat, sugar and flour with no egg and no leavening. The egg here makes a firmer, more biscuit-like cookie that tolerates rolling and cutting, which is what the book wanted to demonstrate.
- RollingAn egg-enriched shortening dough goes slack in a warm kitchen. Chill it half an hour before rolling and flour the board lightly; too much surface flour makes the baked rounds chalky.
- Marking with a forkDocking is decorative here but also useful, since the pricks let steam escape and keep the centres from doming.
- YieldThe book says forty small rounds, but since the quantities are missing from the transcription there is no way to work back to a finished size. Cut larger and expect fewer, with a minute or two more in the oven.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, a few years after the shortening went on sale, and it is a sales document as much as a cookbook: nearly every recipe names the product by brand, and the verb "to Crisco" a pan is used without apology. The company's problem was that American cooks trusted butter and lard and had no reason to want a white, odourless fat made from cottonseed oil, so the book set out to show that anything butter could do, Crisco could do more cheaply and, it argued, more digestibly. Calling this cookie a shortbread is part of that argument, borrowing the prestige of a butter-rich Scottish confection for a dough built on hydrogenated vegetable oil. The recipe's real interest is as evidence of how a new industrial ingredient was introduced into home baking: not by inventing new dishes, but by quietly substituting itself into familiar ones.