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SHREWSBURY CAKES (another way) (Take two pounds of flour one)
Take two pounds of flour, one pound of powdered sugar, and half a pound of butter. Add to these ingredients four eggs, a little rose-water, and a quarter of a pint of cream. Beat them to a firm paste, roll the paste out thin, cut it into cakes, and bake in a quick oven.
A plain Georgian-style biscuit paste, unleavened and stiff — the whole character depends on rolling it genuinely thin and not overworking it. The proportions are heavy on flour and light on fat by modern shortbread standards, so the dough will feel dry until the eggs and cream are fully worked in.
- Quick oven425–450F. Cakes rolled to about 1/8 inch will take 8–10 minutes at that heat; watch for pale gold edges rather than colour across the top. If your cakes are thicker than a coin, drop to 400F so the centres set before the rims darken.
- A quarter of a pintIn an English book of this period a pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 5 fl oz — a generous half cup of cream.
- Powdered sugarNot modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. It means loaf sugar crushed and sieved, closest today to caster sugar. Granulated will work but leaves a slightly gritty crumb.
- Rose-water"A little" is roughly a teaspoon to two teaspoons for this quantity. Modern rose-waters vary enormously in strength; taste a drop first, and use the food-grade kind sold for baking, not a cosmetic toilet water.
- Beat them to a firm pasteThis is the hinge. The dough should come together as a stiff, cohesive paste that rolls without cracking — add the cream in stages, and stop as soon as it holds. Extra liquid makes a soft dough that spreads and loses the crisp snap Shrewsbury cakes are meant to have.
- ButterHalf a pound to two pounds of flour is a lean ratio. Use unsalted butter at cool room temperature and rub or beat it in thoroughly; period butter was commonly salted, so a pinch of salt with the flour restores the balance.
- CuttingA plain or fluted round cutter of 2 1/2 to 3 inches suits this paste. Prick each cake with a fork before baking to stop it doming.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of flour is a large batch; the exact count depends on your cutter and thickness, but expect several dozen thin cakes at least. They keep well for a couple of weeks in a tin.
Shrewsbury cakes are named for the Shropshire town and are among the oldest named English biscuits still made, the name appearing in print at least as early as the sixteenth century; Congreve is often said to have a character in The Way of the World compared to one, though the comparison is usually quoted for shortness or crumbliness and the exact wording is not secure. The town's bakers traded on the name well into the nineteenth century, and the recipes that survive fall into two camps — a rich short paste closer to shortbread, and this drier egg-and-cream version that bakes to a crisp, brittle wafer. The rose-water is the older flavouring, standard in English baking before vanilla extract became cheap and widely available in the later nineteenth century; caraway and cinnamon appear in other versions. Cassell's gives "another way" because the dictionary format collected competing regional and domestic versions side by side rather than settling on one authority.