Great Aunt Lois’s Scottish Shortbread
My first mother-in-law, Laurie Thorp’s mother was Daisy Anderson Thorp of Scots and Quaker stock. Laurie’s Great Aunt Lois (Anderson) lived in North Carolina over near Guilford or Greensboro as I recall. She had this recipe from the previous generations and taught it to us one afternoon when we were visiting with her in the mid-1970s.
Making her shortbread has become a holiday tradition at my house. There are people in the world who don’t think Christmas has come until a small box of my shortbread turns up. Mostly, people hide it from guests and little children (I can’t be held to account for their behavior…). It inspires a certain stinginess. But, it is so easy to make, it really shouldn’t be that precious.
Aunt Lois used her hands to rub the butter into the flour and sugar, letting the warmth of her hands soften the butter. Here’s her recipe:
1 stick of butter
1/4 c. sugar
1-1/4 c. all-purpose flour
She worked it with her hands until she had a pliable dough, patted it out to 3/8″ thick or so, pricked it deeply with a fork so she could break it after it had baked, and to let the steam out of the dough as it cooked (American butter is about 20% water, which has to go somewhere). She baked it for a little over 20 minutes at 325-350° F. until just barely browned. It was heavenly.
Over the years, I have volunteered at an impromptu dinner party where no one had brought dessert to make shortbread. Almost everyone has a little flour, a stick of butter, and a little sugar about. Forty minutes later: shortbread appeared much to everyone’s amazement.
My recipe is very much the same now, though I always use salted butter at home and add a healthy pinch of Kosher salt. Each late November/early December, I go through six or eight pounds of butter and send shortbread out to 18-20 households. So, I no longer work the dough by hand in these marathon baking sessions.
Scaling Up
I use a stand-mixer now, and work with a pound of butter at a time. Here are the directions.
In the bottom of the mixing bowl put:
A generous pinch (1.5 T.) coarse Kosher Salt, less if you’re using a finer milled salt)
Add on top of that
Cream the butter, sugar and salt. I used to use the K-paddle for this, but a dough hook, if you’ll scrape down the sides of the bowl now and then will do just fine and is much easier to clean. (You’ll need to change to the dough hook anyway, so…)
Then, I cut shortbread with cookie cutters, setting them as close together as possible to minimize the number of times I roll out the scraps.
I line rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper and set the cut pieces about 1/4″ apart, a pound of butter will do roughly 4 full-sized sheet pans of cut pieces.
Gather up the scraps, press them back into a cohesive ball of dough (the edges will crack, just ease them together as needed) and re-roll it to the same thickness. Cut again. Do the same until you’ve used all the dough. (There is always a little nubbin of dough that I just roll into a ball and flatten to the right thickness and tuck onto a pan. One has to test these things, right?)
If your house or your kitchen is particularly warm (ours is not), you might want to chill these trays before taking them to the oven.
Bake them at 325°-350° F., for roughly 20-25 minutes, rotating the pans a bit more than half way through. Start checking them for color at around 20 minutes. The moment you notice them starting to brown, remove them from the oven and let them cool in the pan for a few minutes. If you insist on touching them with your fingers when they first come out, they will dimple, so hands off until they’ve cooled. Transfer them to wire racks to fully cool before packing them up.
Now, a word of warning: Be careful how many households you train to expect these.
This year it took two full days to go through six pounds of butter for twenty friends and family. But, with the pandemic on, I won’t be turning up in person, so this is the next best thing. And if they had to choose, most of them would probably want the shortbread over a personal visit anyway…
And offer a prayer to our Scots ancestors and Great Aunt Lois.
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