I long for shortbread: Buttery treat comforting reward for a job well done

During the summer between my junior and senior years in college, I worked at a summer camp in Scotland. It was quite a large camp, serving hundreds of young people over several sessions. I helped run the camp’s newspaper, writing stories about goings-on and working with campers to write and photograph their own articles. When I applied for the job, I had the option of arriving a couple weeks early to join the setup crew. I wanted to spend as much time in Scotland as possible, so I eagerly signed on.

The camp was held on land rented from a sheep farmer. The rest of the year, those few scruffy acres on the banks of bonny Loch Lomond were inhabited by many, many sheep and a few cows. I soon discovered that “setup” meant a week of shoveling dung into wheelbarrows, followed by a week of erecting tents both large and small. It was, even for a vigorous young college student, exhausting work in the shockingly cold and rainy Scottish summer. After endless drizzly hours of hefting cow patties and wheeling mounds of smelly poop up and down rugged hills, or wrestling with canvas and pulling on stubborn tent poles, I wanted to lie down and cry a little.

That’s when I learned to be deeply grateful for teatime. At precisely 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we’d tramp in from the fields, dirty and muddy and somehow both sweaty and chilled to the bone at the same time. The hours since lunch seemed like an eternity and dinner wouldn’t be until 6 p.m. But that didn’t matter because we could sit in the barn for half an hour with steaming mugs of tea and savor the eighth wonder of the world: heaps of buttery shortbread biscuits, still a touch warm from baking.

When I was thoroughly weary of tents and poop, I volunteered to spend a day working in the kitchen. It was located inside the barn and managed by a bevy of sturdy Scottish ladies, a no-nonsense bunch who didn’t put up with shenanigans. They were amused by my notion that cooking was a cushy job where I could at least stay warm and dry. They knew I was playing hooky from the meadow muffins. At any rate, the joke was on me because they gave me the most dreaded job in the kitchen: cleaning the industrial-sized potato peeler, which had sat in storage for a year and contained a plethora of petrified potato peels. It was rough going. I had to stick my arms down inside the deep barrel, which contained a sharp spiral blade, and scour the peels off the steel without flaying my arms. Those potato bits were cemented to the blade like they shared the same molecular structure. It took me most of the day to scrub the peeler to a shiny gleam, at which point I longed for fresh air and open sky. Even rain and poop were better than blades and peels and the steamy closeness of the kitchen.

However, I got one serious perk: I was right there when the shortbread came out of the oven. I have never smelled a better scent in my life, not even apple pie on Thanksgiving. The Scottish matrons, who were really rather tenderhearted after all, pushed a big cup of tea into my hands and let me have first dibs on the shortbread. They said they’d never seen a shinier potato peeler in all their lives and maybe I wasn’t such a shirker after all. I retorted between mouthfuls that my mother might disagree, but I thanked them for their kindness.

I learned how to make shortbread cookies soon after I was married and I often make them at Christmastime. They’re a good gift because they’re pretty, they’re simple and they’ll stay tasty for weeks. With all the cold, wet weather we’ve been getting this April, I’ve been feeling rather wintry. Or maybe it’s just that the drizzle and the damp and the close-to-freezing temperatures remind me of summertime in Scotland. At any rate, here’s the recipe, which is straight from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Put 1¼ cups flour and 3 generous tablespoons of sugar into a mixing bowl. Cut in a stick of cold butter (½ cup) until the mixture is crumbly. Knead the dough until it’s slightly sticky. You think it’s never going to happen, but then the heat of your hands warms the butter and all of a sudden it holds together. Roll the dough into an 8-inch circle on an ungreased cookie sheet. Cut the circle into 16 wedges, like pizza. In fact, a pizza cutter is an excellent tool to use. To make the biscuits prettier, crimp the edges (I use an old serving spoon) and poke holes in the dough with a fork. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the edges turn the merest shade darker. Remove from the oven and cut again along the same lines. Allow to cool a little before breaking apart.

I made two batches of shortbread recently — plain and citrus-vanilla-ginger. Before I cut in the butter, I added 1 teaspoon each of orange zest, vanilla and lemon extract, plus 1 tablespoon of ginger paste. I’ve been nibbling on both and the classic version is just as tasty as the gussied-up version. Sometimes traditional is best.

Every time I eat a piece of shortbread, whether it’s homemade or from a cheery plaid box of Walker’s shortbread biscuits, I think of that barn kitchen in the middle of a sheep field somewhere north of Glasgow. Shortbread, to me, is more than a ridiculously buttery cookie. It’s a reminder that resting after a hard job well done is sweet indeed and kindness often comes from unexpected places.