[Sca-cooks] Cakes with paste very short

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Feb 9, 2007, at 1:07 PM, Elise Fleming wrote:

> His Grace Cariadoc wondered in one of those posts about the  
> proportions of flour, sugar and butter in period and mused as to  
> whether folk were letting their modern concept affect the relative  
> proportions in their modernized adaptations.  It would be  
> interesting to make a chart or a comparison of the ingredients of  
> those period "cakes with paste very short" with the ingredients in  
> modern "Scottish" shortbread.  My very quick scan of modern cookery  
> books and those in the Florilegium would seem to indicate that  
> there are some differences that might preclude the period result  
> from being equal to modern shortbread.
>
> Alys Katharine, concerned that she's being fussy

One thing to consider is that real shortbread tends to contain little  
or no liquid than butter and, sometimes, eggs. In practical terms,  
that means that there's a moderately tight window of how much butter  
you can incorporate into flour and get an even semi-cohesive result.  
Now, for Scottish shortbread this is less of an issue because it  
tends to be baked in pans that support it while it... for lack of a  
better term... sets up/fuses itself together.

But it seems to me the big variation would be in sugar content, which  
would probably coincide to some extent with economic factors... later  
recipes would presumably call for more sugar.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04