Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Scotch Cakes
Scotch Cakes
Cream together 3/4 pound butter and 1 pound sugar, add 1 pound of flour, a tablespoonful of powdered cinnamon, and 1/4 pint of milk. Roll out very thin, cut in rounds, and bake 1/2 hour.
A rolled cinnamon shortbread, given in weights with no leavening and no eggs. The proportions are workable, but the baking time belongs to a cooler, slower coal oven than anything in a modern kitchen.
- Weights into cups3/4 lb butter is 3 sticks (340 g); 1 lb sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 cups. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the dough is stiff and small flour errors change how thin it will roll.
- The quarter pintThe book was published for American cooks, so 1/4 pint reads as 1/2 cup (4 fl oz); an imperial quarter pint would be 5 fl oz. Either works, but add the milk a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the crumbs come together — a wet dough cannot be rolled very thin.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 325-350F. Higher and the high proportion of sugar colours the edges before the centres set.
- Half an hour is too longThis is the instruction to override. Thin rounds of a butter-and-sugar dough are done in 12 to 18 minutes, when the edges are pale gold and the tops look dry. Half an hour in a modern oven will produce something hard and over-browned.
- No leavening is intentionalThere is no baking powder or soda, and none should be added. These are meant to be short and crisp, not risen; overworking the dough after the flour goes in will make them tough rather than tender.
- Chill before rollingWith that much butter the dough turns greasy at room temperature. Rest it wrapped in the refrigerator for 30 minutes, roll on a lightly floured surface to about 1/8 inch, and chill the cut rounds again if the kitchen is warm.
- CinnamonA tablespoon is assertive by modern standards. Start with two teaspoons if your jar is fresh.
- YieldA very large batch; the count depends entirely on how thin you roll and how big you cut. They keep well in a tin for a week and firm up further as they cool, so judge doneness by colour, not by feel while hot.
With a Saucepan over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century American genre in which a compiler gathered dishes from abroad and presented them to home cooks as a kind of armchair travel. "Scotch cakes" here is essentially shortbread stretched with milk and spiced with cinnamon, rather than the thick pressed rounds of shortbread, which traditionally hold to butter, sugar and flour alone. Recipes of this vintage often give weights rather than cups, a habit associated with British practice, and such books can read as oddly precise about ingredients and vague about heat.