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SHREWSBURY CAKES (another way) (Mix half a pound of butter)
Mix half a pound of butter, well beaten into a cream, and the same weight of flour, one egg, six ounces of beaten and sifted loaf sugar, and half an ounce of caraway-seeds. Form these ingredients into a paste, roll out thin, and lay the cakes in sheets on tins. Bake in a slow oven.
A very short ingredient list in the old proportions: equal weights of butter and flour, held together by one egg. The dough behaves more like shortbread than a cookie dough, and that governs everything else.
- Chill before rollingWith butter and flour at equal weight there is nothing to absorb the fat once the room warms up. Bring the paste together, wrap it, and give it 30 minutes in the refrigerator before rolling, then roll between sheets of parchment to about 1/8 inch.
- Slow ovenIn period usage a slow oven is roughly 250 to 300F, and the low heat is deliberate: Shrewsbury cakes are meant to stay pale, not to brown. Bake until the surface looks dry and the edges have barely taken colour, roughly 15 to 20 minutes at the upper end of that range.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard cone that had to be broken up, pounded and sifted, which is why the recipe says "beaten and sifted." Caster sugar is the direct equivalent; 6 oz is about 3/4 cup.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of butter is 2 sticks; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups, but this dough is unforgiving of a heavy-handed cup and is best weighed.
- CarawayHalf an ounce is roughly 2 tablespoons of seed, a heavy hand by modern standards though in keeping with older seed-flavoured baking; 2 teaspoons gives a flavour most modern palates read as seasoned rather than dominated.
- "In sheets on tins"Most likely the cakes laid out on flat baking sheets rather than a slab baked whole, though the wording is ambiguous. If cutting rounds, a plain or fluted 2 1/2-inch cutter spaced an inch apart works; they spread very little.
- Yield and keepingExpect about 30 cakes at that size. They are dry and short, and keep two weeks in a tin, which is what they were designed for.
Shrewsbury cakes are one of the oldest named English biscuits, associated with the Shropshire town since at least the seventeenth century. Early recipes are typically flour, butter, sugar and a flavouring, with caraway or rosewater the usual choices and currants and lemon peel arriving later; the seed version here is the older taste, from a period when caraway went into everything from seed cake to comfits. That Cassell's gives it as "another way" suggests that several traditional proportions for a well-known regional biscuit were in circulation rather than one settled recipe, and the whole thing is a reminder of how much of the nineteenth-century baker's skill lay in handling a paste this rich without a cold kitchen or refrigeration.