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SHREWSBURY CAKES (another way) (Take one pound of flour half)
Take one pound of flour, half a pound of butter, half a pound of castor sugar, and two eggs. Mix these ingredients, and form them into a paste with a glassful of white wine. Roll out then, and cut into cakes with a wine-glass. Bake in a quick oven.
A plain rich biscuit dough with no leavening and no liquid but wine, so the handling matters more than anything else. Keep the butter cool and the mixing brief.
- Castor sugarCaster (superfine) sugar, which dissolves into the butter without leaving grit in a short dough. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a food processor gives the same result.
- A glassful of wineA wineglass in Victorian recipe books is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Add it a spoonful at a time: with a pound of flour and half a pound of butter the dough may come together before the glass is finished, and too much makes it slack.
- Quick oven425-450F. For a thin sugar biscuit that is hot, so watch from about eight minutes; they should be pale gold at the edges only. Many cooks will be happier at 400F for 10-12 minutes.
- Cut with a wine-glassThe rim of a Victorian wineglass gives rounds of roughly 2 to 2.5 inches. Roll the dough about a quarter inch thick for a short, crisp cake.
- No raising agentThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the cakes stay flat and dense. That is correct for Shrewsbury cakes; do not add leavening expecting a lift.
- Chilling helpsThe dough is very rich and will be soft after mixing. Half an hour in the refrigerator makes it roll cleanly and stops the cakes spreading on the sheet.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen biscuits at 2.5 inches. They keep well for a week in a tin and are meant to be eaten crisp.
Shrewsbury cakes are one of the oldest named English biscuits still in print, mentioned by that name in the seventeenth century and long associated with the Shropshire town; a line in Congreve's The Way of the World, in which Sir Wilfull is told he may 'be as short as a Shrewsbury cake', is often quoted as evidence of how familiar they already were. Early versions are flavoured with rosewater, caraway, nutmeg or cinnamon, and the wine here does the same job that rosewater or sack did in older receipts, wetting the dough with something aromatic rather than plain water. Cassell's prints several variants because the biscuit was a standard of the Victorian tea table and of the commercial baker alike, cheap in ingredients, long-keeping, and easy to turn out by the hundred with a glass rim for a cutter.