Petworth Shortcake
This recipe comes from The Petworth Book of Country House Cooking by Peter Brears (2015). Petworth House was the home of the Leconfield family from 1150 before it was gifted to the National trust. It is situated a few miles from Burton Mill in West Sussex.
In the introduction to the chapter on the recipes Brears notes:
‘Most chefs have kept their own recipes as closely guarded secrets… The books in which they wrote down their recipes were similarly guarded, taken with them as they moved from one house to another, and so hardly ever being preserved in the Archives…
This happened at Petworth in the late 1930s, when Lady Leconfield decided that she must search out the recipes of Mrs Lane, who had retired in 1931. Copied out on scraps of paper from the recipe book borrowed from Mrs Lane’s son, these were eventually absorbed into the Petworth Archives.’
I used Burton Mill’s wholemeal flour in these nutty, shortbread biscuits but plain white flour is fine too.
