[Sca-cooks] Cakes with paste very short

[Elise Fleming]

Greetings!  These recipes would make an interesting weekend's challenge to bake and see how close they come to what we think of as shortbread.  I've read through the Florilegium file that Stefan noted and saw that some of the period sources included ingredients that we don't consider part of shortbread today, specifically yeast and eggs.  What is your collective opinion of a modern shortbread which would include yeast and eggs?  Would it still be called "shortbread"?

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

-----Original Message-----
>From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
>Sent: Feb 9, 2007 11:30 AM
>To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
>Subject: Cakes with paste very short
>
>Here's another recipe that describes the finished cakes as
>short as in "so make your Cakes the paste will be very short, therfore 
>make them very little, lay paper vnder them."
>
>To make fine Cakes.
>TAke a quantitye of fine wheate flower, and put it in an Earthen Pot 
>stoppe it close and set it in an Ouen, and bake it as longe as you 
>woulde a Pastye of Venison, and when it is baked it will be ful of 
>clods, then serce your flower through a fine Ser|ser, then take Clouted 
>Creame or swéete Butter, but Creame is best: then take Suger, Cloues, 
>Mace, Saffron and yolkes of Egges, so muche as will seeme to season your 
>Flower, then put these thinges into the Creame, temper all together, 
>then put thereto your flower, so make your Cakes the paste will be very 
>short, therfore make them very little, lay paper vnder them.
>
>Partridge, John, fl. 1566-1573. The widowes treasure plentifully 
>furnished with sundry precious and approoued secretes in phisicke and 
>chirurgery for the health and pleasure of mankinde… Publication Info: At 
>London : Printed by Edward Alde, for Edward White, 1588.
>
>Johnnae