[Sca-cooks] Shortbread was Period Flour Query

[Johnna Holloway]

I just did a short article for the Pale on shortbreads.
"The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen, published in 1594,
included a recipe 'To Make Short Cakes'. That recipe includes the flour,
butter, and sugar of the classic modern versions with the addition of
eggs or egg yolks, cloves, mace, and saffron."
The recipe reads


      To make short Cakes.

TAke wheate flower, of the fayrest ye can get, and put it in an earthern
pot, and stop it close, and set it in an Ouen and bake it, and when it
is baken, it will be full of clods, and therefore ye must searse it
through a search: the flower will haue as long baking as a pastie of
Uenison. When you haue done this, take clowted Creame, or els sweet
Butter, but Creame is better, then take Sugar, Cloues, Mace, and
Saffron, and the yolke of an Egge for one doozen of Cakes one yolke is
ynough: then put all these foresaid things together into the cream, &
te/*m*/per the/*m*/ al together, the/*n*/ put the/*m*/ to your flower 	
	
<<52b 1594>> 	
	
and so make your Cakes, your paste wil be very short, therefore yee must
make your Cakes very litle: when yee bake your cakes, yee must bake them
vpon papers, after the drawing of a batch of bread.

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/thomas.gloning/ghhk/

We recognize it as a short bread or cake because the recipe ends with
that helpful admonishment: “and so make your Cakes, your paste wil be
very short, therefore yee must make your Cakes very litle: when yee bake
your cakes, yee must bake them vpon papers, after the drawing of a batch
of bread.” (Short means friable or brittle with a crumbling texture.)
Another recipe that created a “short” product was that of the Shrewsbury
Cakes."

The earliest printed Scottish cookbook came out in the 1730's. Peter
Brears did an
excellent summary of Scottish cookery books in his introduction to
Elizabeth Cleland's
A New and Easy Method of Cookery from 1755.
See http://www.kal69.dial.pipex.com/shop/system/index.html for part of
that introduction
and information about the book.

Johnnae



Elaine Koogler wrote:
> I'm about to do/say what we're all told not to do...but I do believe that
> shortbread is such an ubiquitous dish in Scotland that there are no really
> period recipes for it.  To be truthful, I've never really even seen a period
> Scottish cookery book at all!  >
> Kiri
>
> On 2/8/07, Aldyth at aol.com <Aldyth at aol.com> wrote:>   
>>> In one of the shortbread discussions it mentions adding rice flour to the
>> (see list of flour) for making it crumbly.  At the risk of being
>> really  dumb,
>> did shortbread originally have rice flour in it? I just have a hard time
>> visualizing rice paddies in Scotland.  :-))>>
>> Aldyth
>