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Scotch Short-Bread
One cupful of butter, one-half of a cupful of moist brown sugar, a little spice for flavoring and flour to make a stiff dough. Mix thoroughly. Put in a pan, press it out as much as desired (it will be too short to roll), and bake in a moderate oven. This is the short-bread of Scotland. It is delicious.
A three-ingredient dough with no quantities for the flour and no time on the oven, which is typical of the period and leaves two things to settle before you start.
- Flour is the open questionThe original gives none, and "stiff dough" is doing all the work. For 1 cup (8 oz) butter and 1/2 cup brown sugar, most shortbread doughs land between 2 1/2 and 3 cups of flour by volume; add it gradually and stop when the crumbs hold together under pressure but will not roll. The recipe is honest that it will be too short to roll.
- Moist brown sugarThis means soft light brown sugar of the kind that packs into a spoon, not demerara or turbinado. Coarse crystals will not dissolve in a dough with no liquid and leave gritty specks.
- Butter and saltButter of this period was commonly salted, and salt suits shortbread. If you use unsalted butter, add about half a teaspoon of salt with the flour or the result tastes flat and sweet.
- A moderate oven350F, though shortbread is more forgiving at 325F. It should colour to pale gold at the edges and no further; browning the surface turns the flavour from buttery to toasted.
- Thickness and timingPress to about 1/2 inch in a shallow pan; at that thickness this quantity of dough needs more area than an 8-inch round. At 325-350F that takes roughly 35 to 45 minutes. Prick all over with a fork before baking so the centre does not dome.
- Cut it hot, cool it in the panScore into fingers or wedges within a minute or two of taking it from the oven. Once cold it shatters rather than cuts, and it needs to cool completely in the pan or it will break apart while still soft.
- "A little spice"Left deliberately vague. Traditional Scottish practice runs to caraway seed or a little ground ginger, mace or cinnamon; a teaspoon of ground spice, or two of caraway, is a reasonable amount. Plain shortbread with no spice at all is equally correct.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of dough, giving 16 fingers or wedges. It keeps a week in a tin.
Shortbread is usually traced to the medieval biscuit bread, twice-baked leftover dough sweetened and dried out; over time the yeast dropped away and butter took its place, which is where the "short" comes from, meaning a dough shortened by fat until it has no gluten stretch left. By the eighteenth century it was firmly Scottish and firmly festive, associated with Hogmanay and with weddings, where a decorated round was sometimes broken over the bride's head. The compiler bothers to tell the reader that this is the short-bread of Scotland. The recipe's refusal to specify flour is characteristic of the era: a cook was expected to know what a stiff dough felt like, and flour itself varied enough from sack to sack that a fixed number would have been misleading.