Scottish delights include cakes and shortbread

Scotland has been in the news for such divisive reasons that it's good to remember its more unifying sides. Like the excellence of Scottish baking which is why, at the St Andrew's Day dinners that celebrated Scottish identity during the British Raj, one of the first toasts was "To the Land of Cakes".

In 1935, the Times of India carried an article by 'a Scotswoman in exile' entitled Favourites from the Land of Cakes. "Every housewife rich or poor has learned in her youth the secrets of baking fairy-light scones and cakes, and no tea table is considered complete without a good sprinkling of 'home mades'," she wrote.

The local ingredients helped: Excellent flour, butter and cream, while Greenock near Glasgow had one of the world's oldest sugar refining factories, using raw sugar produced on Caribbean plantations run by Scots (and often, unfortunately, using slaves supplied by Scottish slave traders).


Scotland's berries make great jam, while marmalade is also claimed as a Scottish invention. Many types of cakes and biscuits are made from these, but as that exiled Scotswoman wrote, the one 'special specialty' of Scotland is shortbread.

It is, perhaps, its elemental simplicity that gives it this status — shortbread is just lots of butter mixed with not too much sugar and flour to give a deceptively rich product. Because it isn't too sweet, your initial reaction when you bite a piece is mostly focussed on its crumbly, melt-in-the-mouth texture. But then your mouth suddenly registers the deluge of butter inundating it and every fat receptor in your palate explodes with joy.

Shortbread is nothing like Mysore pak, but just as that uses besan and sugar to hold together masses of ghee, the sugar and flour (usually including a little rice flour for crispness) in shortbread enable eating lots of butter.



Both sweets leave a similar lingering sense of ecstasy — and an extremely dangerous desire to eat more. The number of Scots in India during the Raj meant that shortbread started to be made in India.

In 1909, ToI carried a remarkably detailed recipe for shortbread, almost a column long and full of small details that often get left out, like the need to warm the flour slightly before mixing. "Pure butter alone must be used, so do not 'make up the weight' with lard or margarine," warned the article sternly.

A few years later, in 1912, with World War I restricting imports, a letter in ToI entitled How to Help suggested readers switch from imported shortbread to the good local variety made by the Delhi Biscuit Manufacturing Company.

Today the cost of butter, and super health conscious consumers, mean big Indian companies don't make shortbread. But it persists elsewhere. The luscious Shrewsbury biscuits from Kayani Bakery in Pune are definitely a variant of shortbread.

And in 1983, ToI carried a story about a small bakery at Rampur near Lucknow where a young baker named Iqbal Khan made excellent shortbread. Would any reader know if this outpost of Scottish shortbread still exists?