welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
in the old cookbook
show i'm going to apologize right off
the top because today's recipe might get
a little bit
ranty today we're going to do a recipe
out of
this cookbook it's called the scots
kitchen with old time recipes
this is a cookbook that was published in
scotland
in 1929 and what the author has done is
gone
back to older scottish cookbooks either
these ones
some of the recipes from my scottish
cookbooks from
the mid-1800s to the 1700s are in this
book and
the author credits them directly
but the author's also gone back to
manuscripts cookbook manuscripts
from the 16th and 1700s compiled
all of these traditional scottish
recipes and tried to keep them as true
as possible
and so today we're going to do tantalon
cakes and tantalone cakes are named
after a castle in scotland and they are
a type of shortbread
which brings us to why this might get a
little bit ranty
so i'm going to start out in this bowl
and in this bowl i'm going to add
flour wheat flour a while back on the
channel
i did my scottish grandmother's
shortbread recipe
and i got just an unbelievable amount of
hate mail
from people who claim to be scottish
they may be scottish who knows but you
know on the internet you can never tell
and they really got down on me because
my grandmother's scottish shortbread
recipe
uses rice flour as does this recipe for
tantalon cakes so here i'm putting in
the rice flour i'm also going to put in
some soda now i took a lot of heat over
the rice flour
a lot of heat over the rice flour and
what it seemed to me is that our
understanding of
food history of our culture of
food really doesn't extend back that far
and a lot of people don't
seem to understand
when certain things showed up in their
cultural diet
and when it transformed into other
things because a lot of people said to
me no true scottish
shortbread uses corn flour
perhaps true scottish shortbread in 2020
uses cornflour true scottish shortbread
since the 1950s
has used corn flour and that's where the
break sort of happens
so when we go back into these cookbooks
shortbread always contains rice flour
and one of the reasons for that is rice
first arrives in scotland in the mid
1300s and by the 1400s is fully
integrated into
scottish cooking not as an everyday item
but nor was shortbread and everyday item
shortbread really was something that you
had
every once in a while
so the next thing i'm going to do is
cream together this
butter let's get it in the bowl
and this sugar
and one of the main arguments that
people continually made
about rice or rice flour being used in
these recipes is that rice isn't grown
in scotland and that it would be too
expensive and because it's not grown
there it would never be used
yet no one seems to really make much
much of a fuss about the sugar
sugar doesn't grow terribly well in
scotland either it would have to be
imported
and wheat flour again is something that
didn't grow terribly well
in scotland either it was also imported
or
a lot of the wheat flour was imported
so just the the the ingredients
as a whole for this shortbread recipe
would have been relatively difficult to
obtain relatively expensive
not something that you made all that
often and so the um
the rice flour on its own wasn't
necessarily
something that was a tripping point
fast forward to the 1680s 1690s
there's a giant jump forward in rice
production in the colonies
here in north america in particular the
carolinas
so i'm i'm just whisking together two
eggs and so this revolution in rice
happens
in the carolinas in the 1680s 1690s
and by the early 1700s 1705 1710
so much rice is being produced in the
carolinas
that the price drops it's quantity
quality and a price drop and there's no
way around it the reason the price drops
is
it's being grown in the carolinas with
slave labor
makes it an incredibly inexpensive crop
it's being shipped
to england and by extension into
scotland because all of the rice
produced in the colonies
had to go first to england before it
could be shipped anywhere else so that
they could tax it
and so scotland becomes awash in rice it
becomes
really inexpensive and in the case of
this recipe or
shortbread the cost of the rice flour
is lower than the cost of
the wheat flour it is lower than the
cost of the sugar even
that's how it becomes so integrated into
scottish cooking now i know the recipe
said to alternate
between the eggs and the flour mixture
but because i've got this mixer i
decided to put the eggs in
all first and then i'm slowly going to
spoon in the flour rice flour mixture
now as all of this rice and by extension
rice flour starts to flood
into scotland in the 1710s you start to
see
a breakaway in what is considered a
shortbread recipe
and shortbread sort of breaks into
earlier shortbread recipes from some of
these books
is something that is leavened with yeast
eggs milk or cream are included
in this early 1700s you start to see the
recipes
break off where shortbread becomes
simpler and simpler it just
becomes flour rice flour
butter sometimes a little bit of salt
and then you see recipes like this start
to crop up
where they're called something different
but they retain a leavening agent like
this one does with the soda they retain
eggs
and some of them still retain milk or
cream although this one
does not this one does ask for
lemon as flavoring so i'm gonna put in a
little bit of lemon zest
and here again this is something that i
find quite humorous in the arguments
against rice flour
yes it's already missing some peel i
used this in one of the cocktail videos
so it's missing some of the peel is that
no one would question me putting lemon
zest
in a scottish shortbread because it's
asked for in even the earliest ones they
ask
for lemon peel orange peel that sort of
thing again
not grown in scotland and very expensive
to get to scotland
and so people don't question that but
they'll
um some of the comments raved on and on
that true traditional scottish
shortbread should have vanilla in it
um and again that's not knowing your
food history
vanilla doesn't
show up until the mid-1800s in scottish
cooking
it isn't until 1841 that humans
figure out how to pollinate vanilla so
that it can be grown commercially
now it would have been available since
the 1600s
but it would have been so rare and
expensive
that it wasn't used until the 1860s
okay so i'm going to switch to a wooden
spoon while i mix in the last of this
flour i need to make a stiff enough
dough that i can roll it out on the
counter and then cut it with a cookie
cutter
now which brings us to cornflour so
modern recipes for tantalon cakes for
shortbread
that are all listed as traditional
um often use corn flour in fact for the
tantalum cakes all of the ones that i
found
use corn flour and there's a couple of
fairly famous ones online from paul
hollywood
that use corn flour corn flour starts to
arrive
around the turn of the 1900s
as farming practices in the united
states and canada get better at
growing corn and of course corn is a new
world
crop it didn't exist in europe until the
europeans came to north america and took
it back to europe it took a long time to
catch on until hybridization happened
and so intensified farming practices in
the early 1900s
lead to a drop in the price of corn lead
to a drop in the price of corn flour
although we would call it here
cornstarch
and as something becomes plentiful and
cheap
it's supplanted rice flour so rice flour
became
relatively more expensive than corn
flour and people started
using it started using corn flour
instead of rice flour because it does
exactly the same
thing for a cheaper price so why
wouldn't you
that's that's an easy easy thing to
change
and when you get to these cookbooks
from the scottish women's rural
institute this one's from 1939 this
one's from sometime in the 1950s i think
it's undated
there are seven shortbread recipes in
each of these cookbooks
and so in 1939 you start to see
corn flour creeping in there's one
recipe with corn flour there's three
recipes with a rice flour
and there's a couple of recipes that
don't have anything and there's one with
margarine
i don't think we really need to talk
about the one with margarine but you can
see that that change is starting to
creep so sometime between
world war one and world war ii corn
flour
makes its way into scottish cooking
replacing rice flour and eventually
apparently
pushes rice flour completely out which
leaves us with the question of
why my scottish grandmother and millions
of other scottish grandmothers in north
america used rice flour
is because they left scotland before
rice flour was supplanted
and it continued to be used here which
is often the way
people after they've left the country
try to hang on to their heritage a
little bit
stronger and they're unwilling to make
some changes
which could be the case in this case
okay i think i've got a pretty good
dough
here so i'm going to put the last little
bit of flour
out on the bench and
take our dough out
and i'm just going to knead the last
little bit of flour
into the dough just like we would a
shortbread
so now i'm going to roll it out and i
think the moral of
this morning's story and recipe is
anytime you see
a recipe that's labeled as traditional
or anytime someone says to you there's
only one way to make it and this is the
traditional way to make it
they're probably not correct um food
changes over time and food has changed
incredibly
over the last 150 years with advances in
farming techniques with advances in
moving plants globally around the world
so there's no seasons anymore
but the biggest change came with the
colombian exchange
that period in time after europeans
uh ran over top of north america and
then brought all of
the foods all kinds of foods back to
europe
and so there's several um
traditional foods that people talk about
especially in scottish cooking that
include potatoes
and potatoes don't show up in any
written literature in scotland until
1701 and in the period between 1701
and say the 1730s when potatoes are
mentioned
um they're linked to moral depravity
people who eat potatoes
become morally depraved don't eat
potatoes
they're not good for you and that
continues into the 1740s and it's not
until the 1740s
or so that potatoes start to be grown
commercially
and consumed in any quantity in scotland
so you know any traditional scottish
recipe with potatoes
probably didn't come about until the
1740s or after
so i've cut them into these little
rounds and i'm going to put them on a
baking tray lined with parchment paper
and we're going to bake these off in the
oven but before i put them in the oven
i'm going to prick them with a fork
and once i pulled them out of the oven i
sprinkled a little sugar on top
hey friends hey glenn hey jewels sugar
on top
tantalon cakes tantalon cake tantalum
named after
a castle called tantalon okay um
legend has it they were served there
it's always the legend
it's always a good legend but every good
recipe there's a good legend
it is mainly not true not true um
they're not served there anymore because
the castle is well they're served right
here tumbly down ones yes
um let's see
yeah that's a nice little lemon cookie
it's like a tea social mm-hmm social tea
what are those called
social cheese they're probably really
good for dunking not that they're crispy
and hard like i don't want to say
they're hard
but certain certainty certain cookie
structures soak up the tea
so nicely so it's the structure isn't
that
melt in your mouth of a shortbread
the egg the egg changes that structure a
little bit so it's got a little bit more
structure
i like the flavor i like the texture and
as i go through
these other cookbooks and look at
similar cookies with similar names or
shortbreads um there's a lot of overlap
and there's a lot of disparity
between shortbread cookies or the
shortbread recipes
in that the use of eggs the use of of
milk the use of cream the use of other
leavening agents yeast that sort of
thing
changes constantly through time
shortbread is one of those things that
is based on your family yes your
favorite version is the version that
your grandma made
because that's the one you love that's
the one you know but there are so many
versions of it so many versions of it
and
there is no i don't there's no right way
to make it other than the right way that
you like it
that's the only that's the only right
way and i think i think a lot of people
would be surprised to find
out shortbread recipes look like in the
1800s the 1700s and the 1600s
that that version that you're making
today that everyone calls the classic
is a post-world war ii invention maybe
i don't know it's right there okay
i believe you millions won't
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you