Shortbread is one of the oldest kinds of baked good in the British Isles, and one of the simplest. It's descended from early Scottish griddle breads called "bannocks" -- the word comes from the Latin panicium, a term used for any baked dough. The holiday time, then as now, impelled bakers to use their best ingredients for specialty breads; and a common Yuletide treat in the northern Celtic lands before Christianity arrived was the "Yule bannock", a round sweet oat flour-based cake decorated to look like the sun (with fluted edges suggesting sun rays) and scored into quarters in order to suggest the four seasons of the year.

During the Reformation period there were a lot of attempts by the new Protestant church authorities (and the civil authorities who were under their thumbs) to impose their will on the local Scottish populations by stamping out old local traditions. They abolished Christmas, for example, claimimg that it was a Catholic invention. And the old Yule traditions normally celebrated at New Year's did no better -- in 1573, for example, a party of fourteen women were tried for "playing, dancing and singing filthy carols on Yule Day [New Year's] evening."

The locals' response to this during the following half-century or so of repression was pretty much what it would be now: the celebrations and traditions went underground when the authorities were watching, and came right out again when they weren't. The Yule bannock changed its shape, routinely being baked square and cut into long rectangular pieces. It changed its recipe too as time went by, getting sweeter, adding wheat flour to the recipe (or losing the oat flour entirely), and adding more butter . It got "shorter", as a baker would say -- more crumbly and tender -- with the addition of that extra butter, and therefore started to be called "shortbread" in the 1700s. In fact, professional bakers insisted loudly that it was a bread even though there was no yeast in it: this kept it from being taxed at the higher rate assigned to cookies or biscuits. (Scottish bakers won the most recent of these taxation challanges in the 1990s.)

Over the course of time shortbread has become one of Scotland's primary exports -- some sources say its largest. It's eaten all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, and is well known in many other countries. It's also baked once again in the round, with fluted or crimped edges and scored into eighths (called by some "petticoat tails"), as well as in short straight "fingers" that are easier to eat with your tea. Some bakers who make shortbread in the round have taken to decorating it with sunburst or sunflower shapes (as ours is above), which closes the historical circle nicely.

Our recipe goes back to the one in a traditional Scottish recipe booklet distributed in Scotland in the 1950s: you can download a .PDF copy of the whole thing here, if you like.

The basic recipe:

• 10 ounces pastry flour or all-purpose flour
• 2 ounces rice flour (if you can't get this, substitute another 2 ounces of wheat flour as above)
• 8 ounces sweet (unsalted) butter
• 4 ounces granulated sugar: regular (US) granulated / (UK/Irish) caster sugar is OK, but superfine is better if you can get it

Method:

Bring the butter up to a cool room temperature and cut into cubes. With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together. Once the butter / sugar mixture is beginning to fluff up (you don't have to overdo this step: a few minutes of creaming will be enough), start adding the flour or flour mixture, a spoonful at a time, until all of it has been added and the mixture gathers together. Be careful not to overmix at this point or the shortbread will become tough.

Have ready a round, buttered 8-inch cake pan. Roll the shortbread mixture out into a round about half an inch thick. The rolled-out circle should be at least an inch or two wider than the pan. Cut around the bottom of the pan to make the basic shortbread cake.

Flute the edges of the basic cake by pressing between finger and thumb or using the tines of a fork to press the edge of the shortbread cake gently against your thumb. When you're finished, lift the cake carefully into the pan.

For the decorative upper layer: Gather together the shortbread mix trimmed from around the cake, compress it into a ball and then roll it out again, about 1/4 inch thick. Use a square biscuit cutter (or knife) to cut out six or eight two-inch-wide square shapes: cut these in turn "corner to corner" into four quarters.

Begin arranging the triangles around the edge of the cake, point outward, to look like the petals of a flower or rays of a sun. When the outermost circle is completed, start another circle inside that, point outward again, but staggered so that the point of each second-row trangle covers the spot where two of the outer triangle-pieces meet). When this circle is finished, start another one further in. When you're about to run out of triangle material, roll the last scraps of shortbread out and cut small circles to cover the center of the decoration.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and bake the shortbread for about 15 minutes or just until it starts to color. Then immediately lower the heat to about 325 and allow to continue baking for another 40-50 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the pan: then turn out very carefully onto a wire rack and let it cool completely.

Once completely cold, wrap in greaseproof paper or baking parchment and store in a cookie tin or similar airtight container. Shortbread made this way will keep for weeks if the container is kept tightly shut.

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