Happy St. Patrick's Day and National Irish Food Day with Almond Short Bread Cookies

Happy St. Patrick's Day and National Irish Food Day! This semester we are featuring recipes from cookbooks located in the UW-Stout Archives Special Collections. The Special Collections are older, more rare, or Stout related books that were originally located in the UW-Stout Library’s main stacks collection. This past year we added a wealth of cookbooks to the special collections, and I scoured the shelves for recipes to bring the world of baking to your home during this time.

Get into the Irish spirit with an easy 5-ingredient cookie recipe, Almond Short Bread, found in Around the World Making Cookies, by Josephine Perry, 1940, TX771.P4 1940.

Almond Short Bread, p. 98

Mix together:

2 cups flour sifted

½ cup almonds blanched and ground

½ cup butter softened

½ cup sugar

1 tbsp. water

Add the sugar and flour alternately to the butter, blending in the water as needed to make a stiff dough. Divide into halves, form into flat round cakes about the size of a saucer, prick with a fork, flute the edges and bake at 350*F for 30 minutes.

This is a short, 5-ingredient recipe, but I still had some issues, probably because the directions are so simplified. Mixing one cup flour and the butter together started well and it had a dough like mixture, but as I added more sugar and flour the mixture became more dry and crumbly. I added almost two extra tablespoons of water. The recipe does not specify where to add in the almonds, so I added them at the end after mixing the other ingredients together. When dividing the dough into halves, other Almond Short Bread cookie recipes call for wrapping the two halves in plastic wrap and putting them in the fridge for one hour. You could use a round cookie cutter to cut the cookies (which I should have done, but I thought it would be hard with the crumbly texture of my dough), or roll the dough into two logs and cut into slices for baking the cookies. This recipe said to make them about the size of a saucer, like a small plate placed under a teacup, so I made my round cakes bigger than a regular sized cookie, and made three cakes. They still turned out good in the end, they just need to be broken up to eat them. They taste similar to the Ischl Tartlet cookies I made in February. They are a little on the dry side, but would be good spread with raspberry jam or dunked in your morning cup of coffee. No matter how often we bake and cook, we are continuously learning new ideas, skills, and recipes, so don't be discouraged if something doesn't turn out perfect the first time you try it. Learn from your experience and try again, or apply your new skills to another recipe. I also try to find a silver lining, such as being able to dunk my slightly dry cookies into my morning coffee for a breakfast treat. Bon Appetit!

My 5 ingredients: sugar, flour, water, butter, ground almonds

The mixes dough

My attempt to shape the short bread from my dry dough

Almond Short Bread hot out of the oven

There are many variations of shortbread cookies. Try Almond-Orange Shortbread from Martha Stewart: https://www.marthastewart.com/340976/almond-orange-shortbread

And a Gluten free Almond Flour Shortbread Cookie:  https://www.theconsciousplantkitchen.com/almond-flour-shortbread-cookies/

By: Julie Hatfield, Archives Assistant, UW-Stout Archives