Colonial Shortbread from 1791

I finally made the 100% authentic shortbread that I wrote about in this post. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, it had a lot of strange ingredients that aren't used in modern shortbread such as orange peel, caraway, almonds and the froth from beer.

I ended up using about a cup of beer froth and I thought it was a good adjustment. The shortbread had a very old, English taste to it. It was a pretty good mixture of flavors and overall tasted pretty yummy. It wasn't as sugary as the shortbread of today.

We don't use caraway much anymore besides for bread. It was interesting to taste it in a desert food. If you don't have the chance to bake it over a fire, it will turn out exactly the same in a normal oven.

 Cooking in tin has it's advantages over modern nonstick pans; you can cut straight in the pan without worrying about nicking the nonstick coating. Shortbread has enough butter that it won't stick at all.

I hope some of you get a chance to try this sometime. We ate it as a part of an authentic colonial meal that Jodi from Curious Acorn prepared. There was ham, pumpkin and apple pudding (with heirloom pumpkin which was more like a squash,) Indian slapjack (cornmeal pancakes) with quince jam and apple cider. Everything was delicious.