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Original Shortbread

From Cindy Renfrow/Sincgiefu, Author and Publisher of "Take a Thousand Eggs or More" and "A Sip Through Time" http://www.thousandeggs.com, with comments from Jeff Heilveil <heilveil at uiuc.edu>. See also http://www.florilegium.org/ (where much of this info was sourced)

Originally From The Widowes Treasury by John Partridge, 1585.
Makes about 6 dozen cookies.

Original instructions: To make fine Cakes. Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as you would a Pasty of Venison, and when it is baked it will be full of clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer. Then take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your cakes. The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little. Lay paper under them.

First, the flour is baked. This should coagulate the gluten, so that when the flour is sifted, it will become granular and remain roughly granular in any dough into which it is mixed. The pre-baked flour will be very hard and lumpy; you will need to rub it through a sieve in order to use it. Precooking the flour also gives the cookies a slightly nutty flavour

The spices are mixed into the sugar combined with egg yolks and creamed into the butter or clotted cream. Sugar could be listed with the spices because it had to be ground or grated, and it would make sense to do all of this at once. Clotted cream is more liquid than butter and will use more dry ingredients and blend the flavors better.

The flour is then added to the creamed mixture to form a paste. The flour is added primarily to thicken the dough and reduce the surface butter fat - work in enough flour to make a ball of dough that holds together

Make separate little cakes and lay them out on a baking sheet. There should be enough fat in the dough
so you don't have to grease it. They may have been baked on the paper to keep the bottom of the small cake from being soiled and prevent the dough from sticking to the oven.

1. Suggested proportions: Roast five cups of pastry flour in a covered casserole and sift it fine.
Take 1/2 cup butter at room temperature & cream in 1 cup sugar mixed with 1/2 teaspoon each of cloves and mace and saffron. Add 1 egg yolk and blend it in. Stir in 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup at a time. To make the cakes, make a ball of dough about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter, then press it out into a rough circle of between 1/2 and 1/4 inch thick. The recipe says nothing about glazing the cakes, but I would consider that a matter of choice. It also says nothing about baking these, but I would bake at 350 degrees F for about 25 minutes or until golden brown (baking could be for anything around 15 - 30 - 50 minutes).

2. The ones below are not too crumbly:

To every 3 cups of sifted baked flour, take the following:
1 1/2 cups butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon clove powder
1/2 teaspoon mace powder
1/2 pinch saffron, crumbled
3 egg yolks

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the spices and egg yolks, and beat to mix thoroughly. Add the flour, and beat until smooth. Use a non-stick cookie sheet, or line a cookie sheet with baking parchment. Take the dough, 1 level teaspoonful at a time, and roll into small balls with your hands. (Resist the temptation to make them larger -- they won't cook in the middle if they're too big.) Flatten the balls slightly, and place them 2 inches apart on the cookie sheet. Bake for 9 minutes, or until the cookies are puffed and golden around the edges. Remove from oven and cool on wire racks.