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Normandy Short Cakes
Mix 1/2 pound sugar and 1/2 pound fresh butter to a cream, add 1/2 pound flour slowly, roll out thin, and cut in rounds. Bake on oiled paper, in hot oven, and eat with cream cheese and fruit jam.
A three-ingredient shortbread by weight, with the ratio doing all the work. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the dough cold enough to roll thin without the butter breaking out.
- The ratioHalf a pound each of sugar, butter and flour is about 1 cup sugar, 1 cup (2 sticks) butter and about 1 3/4 cups flour. Equal weights of fat and sugar to flour is a high proportion of both, so the dough will be soft and slack at room temperature.
- Chill before rollingCreamed butter and sugar with this little flour cannot be rolled thin as mixed. Rest the dough in the refrigerator until firm, roll between sheets of paper, and chill the cut rounds again before baking or they will spread into one sheet.
- "Hot oven"Period sources vary, but the term generally falls somewhere around 400-450F. At the upper end these cakes scorch before the centres set, given the sugar load; 375F is the safer reading of the instruction, baking only until the edges are pale gold.
- Oiled paperParchment, and no oil needed. The greased paper of 1900 was the equivalent of a modern lined sheet, not an invitation to add fat to something already half butter.
- Thin means thinAbout 1/8 inch. Rolled thicker they behave like ordinary shortbread rounds and need several more minutes; rolled thin they are crisp and snap, which is what makes them a vehicle for cream and jam.
- Cream cheeseProbably not the modern stabilised block product. The term in 1902 could cover a fresh unripened soft cheese of the fromage blanc or petit-suisse type, spooned rather than spread; mascarpone or a thick fresh curd cheese is closer in texture to that reading.
- Yield and servingAt 1/8 inch and two inches across, a pound and a half of dough gives a very large batch -- on the order of 100 rounds -- so halve the quantities unless baking for a crowd. Assemble at the table, since the cheese and jam soften the biscuit within minutes.
The recipe comes from Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), one of a wave of turn-of-the-century American books that gathered dishes from European travel and presented them under national labels. Normandy earns the name here through its dairy: the region's butter and its fresh soft cheeses were already a byword in the English-speaking cookery press, and a biscuit of nothing but butter, sugar and flour eaten with cream cheese and jam is essentially a showcase for good butter twice over. The dough itself is a plain butter-sugar-flour mixture of a kind common across northern Europe and Britain long before this book, which suggests the attribution is more about the accompaniments than the dough. Serving a thin sweet biscuit with fresh cheese and preserved fruit was ordinary practice in a period when jam was one of the common ways a household kept summer fruit through the winter.