[Sca-cooks] Shortbread was Period Flour Query

David Friedman ddfr at daviddfriedman.com
Fri Feb 9 10:38:25 PST 2007


>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."

I have three problems with labelling this shortbread, a label that 
suggests that it is more or less the same as what we now call 
shortbread.

1. It is spiced--cloves, mace and saffron.

2. While no quantities are given, the sugar is in the list of spices, 
which suggests to me that you are using a lot less sugar than flower 
and cream. Looking over a few modern recipes, the ratio of sugar to 
butter seems to be in the range 1:1 to 1:2.

3. Clotted cream is preferred to butter. I have never cooked with 
clotted cream so don't know how much difference that would make.

Incidentally, does anyone have a good explanation of why you bake the 
flour first?
-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/



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