I've always wished I had a Scottish granny. Nothing against the two ladies to whom I owe my taste for slabs of Thornton's toffee and cream sherry, but if they ever baked a round of shortbread, it never made it on to the tea table while I was visiting. I won't deny that Tunnock's tea cakes – another great Scottish snack – have their merits, but despite not having a tartan bone in my body, I nurse a particular passion for shortbread as wild and romantic as anything in the work of Sir Walter Scott.
Sandy as the Western Isles, and rich as an RBS board member, shortbread is without doubt the finest biscuit Britain has ever produced. (Although, strictly speaking, thanks to the efforts of the Scottish Association of Master Bakers, it's not a common biscuit at all, but a "speciality item of flour confectionery" – for tax purposes, at least. Even baked goods are canny with their pennies north of the border, it seems.)
All you really need to know about shortbread is in the name: according to Laura Mason and Catherine Brown's methodically researched encyclopedia The Taste of Britain, "short" has been used to describe a "friable, brittle, crumbling texture" since medieval times. The first recipes called for "barm" (the yeasty foam formed by fermentation) along with butter and a "Peck of Flour", which sounds more like a modern shortcake, but by the 19th century the leavening agents had returned to their duties in brewing, and the shortbread had taken its current form – a sweet, crumbly biscuit.
According to one Mistress Meg Dods (aka Christian Isobel Johnstone) writing in 1826 as she prepared a box to send south for Christmas, the buttery biscuit is a treat reserved for special occasions. You don't get shortbread in a box of Family Circle (the hopefully named "rich shortie" is no substitute), or nestling amongst the pink wafers at the blood donation centre – its natural habitat is Sunday china, and Christmas Eve. Even the tartan pouches of Walkers beloved of refreshment trolleys have a certain posh thrill about them, particularly when dunked in railway tea. But, assuming you don't travel enough to get your fix, what's the best way to make shortbread at home?
The basic
According to the Orcadian folklorist and food writer F Marian McNeill, who published The Scots Kitchen in 1929, classic shortbread contains just three ingredients, flour ("dried and sieved"), butter ("squeezed free of all water") and sugar ("fine caster"). It all, she says, depends on the quality of this trio, 'careful blending … and careful firing'.
Reading on, however, her shortbread turns out to contain rice flour (of which more later), forcing me to fall back on the patron saint of inept cooks, Delia Smith, for my first recipe. In her Complete Cookery Course, she beats 110g butter until creamy, stirs in 50g caster sugar, and then sifts in 175g plain flour. The dough is rolled out to a 3mm thickness, cut into biscuits, and baked at 150C for half an hour. The results remind me of the description of shortbread in the Oxford Companion to Food as essentially "a thick layer of rich, sweetened shortcrust pastry": crumbly and sweet, this would make an excellent accompaniment to some fruit and cream, but isn't rich or buttery enough to satisfy on its own.
Enter the rice
Improbably exotic as it may sound in this context, ground rice (available from the Asian or baking sections of large supermarkets, depending on the relative propensity of the local population to make phirni or shortbread – fine semolina also works if you can't find it) has long been the secret of many a cook's deliciously sandy shortbread. The recipe in the Leiths Baking Bible suggests a ratio of 55g ground rice to 115g plain flour, stirred into 115g softened butter and 55g caster sugar. The dough is then shaped and baked for 20 minutes at 170C – and it's absolutely delicious. There's a definite crunch when I bite into a piece, and the rice has made the crumb fabulously friable. This could be a contender – although I'd reduce the ratio of rice slightly, or it's more grit than biscuit.
Cornflour
Scottish food expert Sue Lawrence knows her shortbread – and she uses cornflour, rather than ground rice, to give a "nice melt in the mouth texture" – 50g to 200g plain flour, along with 175g slightly-salted butter and 85g caster sugar. (Shortbread, she says, benefits from a wee bit of salt, and I have to agree – a generous pinch also works wonders.) It's patted out and cooked in a gentle 150C oven for 35 to 40 minutes, to give a rich, feather soft shortbread that does indeed dissolve on the tongue. The flavour is good, but personally, I prefer a bit of Scottish sand in my petticoat tails.
Baking powder
I find only one recipe using any sort of leavening agent, as used at Ballymaloe Cookery School – the news of the change in recipe must have been lost somewhere over the Irish Sea. A good pinch of baking powder is sifted into 275g butter and 110g caster sugar, along with 350g plain flour and 75g ground rice, and baked in a 150C oven for an hour. There's a satisfying 'snap' as I break a biscuit in half, but I find the texture rather dry and crunchy – I can imagine these with ice cream, but they're a bit too austere for a cup of tea.
Rich shortbread
This leads me to seek out a richer recipe for so-called Ayrshire shortbread, which, not content with the butter and sugar content of the traditional biscuit, demands cream and egg as well. I try one taken from a 1936 manual of Household Management, which uses 2 tbsp cream and 1 egg yolk stirred into 225g plain flour, 100g rice flour, 100g caster sugar, and 100g butter. The dough is moister than an all-butter version, and the shortbread has a rather scone-like texture – in fact, fluffy wouldn't be too strong a word for these deviants. Too soft by half – proper Sassenach biscuits in fact.
Chilled out …
Sue Lawrence, and Leiths, both call for softened butter. Delia and Good Housekeeping ask for it at room temperature. Chef Marcus Wareing, however, in his book How to Make the Perfect … specifies the butter for his mother-in-law Doreen's shortbread must be chilled, and then grated into the dry ingredients. This is a technique I've come across before in pastry making – keeping the mixture cool means it's easier to work with.
However, according to Bon Appetit magazine, using cold butter also helps to give a flaky, rather than a crumbly finished product, as "the relatively large particles … leave air pockets when they melt during baking". Flaky is not a word writ large in my shortbread dreams, but I give the recipe a try anyway, chilling the dough for an hour in the fridge before baking as well in obedience to Doreen. The texture of her shortbread does seem different – looser, somehow, and when I break one in half, I spot a few tiny cavities in the crumb.
As Leiths also recommend chilling the dough before baking, although only for 15 minutes, I make another batch of their recipe with soft butter, stick it straight in the oven without passing the fridge, and end up with thinner, crunchier biscuits – presumably because the mixture spreads as the fat melts. I conclude that refrigerating the dough is a good idea, but chilling your butter probably isn't.
Roll on, roll off
In the course of my baking, I've noticed that many recipes instruct the baker to pat her biscuits into shape, rather than rolling them. This puzzles me, until I read F Marian McNeill's explanation: too much pressure on the dough has a "tendency to toughen it". Sue Lawrence agrees that if you have cool hands, you should use them – if not, she says, a light rolling pin will be fine.
To put this to the test, when making the Ballymaloe biscuits, I roll out half the dough firmly, and pat the other half into shape by hand. Oddly enough, the rolled biscuits, which start off flatter, seem to have risen slightly more than their patted counterparts, but they're also a little less crumbly. It's a fine point, but for the perfect shortbread, you should probably go as easy on the dough as possible.
Shortbread has so few ingredients that you can't get away with cutting corners; good quality butter and sugar are essential, and plenty of them. Rice flour gives it that special sandy texture that sets it apart from the common biscuit, and a pinch of salt helps to balance that rich, delicious sweetness. Treat the dough gently, chill it, and cook it gently, sprinkle liberally with brown sugar – and wash down with a pint of Irn Bru.
Perfect shortbread
Makes about 12 portions
115g butter, at room temperature
55g caster sugar (I like to use golden for flavour)
Good pinch of salt
130g plain flour
40g ground rice
Demerara sugar, to finish
1. Pre-heat the oven to 150C. Put the butter into a large mixing bowl, and beat with a wooden spoon until soft. Beat in the sugar and salt.
2. Sift over the flour and ground rice and mix to a smooth dough; if it doesn't come together, add a little more butter.
3. Line a 15cm cake or tart tin with baking parchment, and pat, or lightly roll, the dough into a shape slightly smaller than the tin. Alternatively pat out to 1cm thickness and cut into biscuits and put on a lined baking tray. Put in the fridge to chill for 15 minutes until firm.
4. Bake for around an hour (about half that for biscuits) until cooked through, but not browned. Take out of the oven and cut into fingers, slices or squares.
5. Allow to cool for a couple of minutes, then sprinkle with demerara sugar and transfer to a wire rack. Once cold, this should last for a good few days in an airtight container (or the coolest oven in an Aga, according to Darina Allen of Ballymaloe).
Could shortbread be the greatest British biscuit of all time – and if so, what's your favourite recipe? Is Walkers shortbread the best on the market, or does anyone share my sneaking fondness for Prince Charles' elegant shortbread thins, despite his Welsh loyalties? And are added flavourings ever acceptable north of the border?
