The word sablé is French for sandy and is often pinned on shortbread. It’s not the most charming culinary word, but it aptly describes the lovely bit of graininess so characteristic of shortbread. With these cookies, everything depends on the ingredients, of which there are few, and the way you work with them, which should be gently. A classic sablé might have eggs or might not; it has sugar, but it shouldn’t have too much; and it always has butter — it might just as well be called a butter cookie. A shortbread that isn’t melt-in-your-mouth buttery ought to be banished from the clan.

For years, my two favorite sablés were one I made for the shop, a slightly caky cookie (using just yolks made the texture more delicate), and the tad crisper, scallop-edged shortbread called Punitions, from the Poilâne boulangerie in Paris. The Poilâne cookies are a lesson in the importance of fine butter (the bakery uses tangy cultured butter) and careful mixing. I was lucky to get that lesson directly from Lionel Poilâne.

Poilâne had given me the recipe for the cookies, and to ensure that I’d get them right, he made them with me by hand. If I kept a scrapbook of great baking moments, this one would be among my most prized. Although it was almost 20 years ago, my hands hold the memory of how the dough felt at each moment; how lithe the sugar and eggs were before he rubbed in the butter; and how the dough formed chubby curds before he kneaded it into a ball with a few swift and graceful motions refined over 40 years of practice.