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SHREWSBURY CAKES (another way) (Take one part of sifted sugar)
Take one part of sifted sugar and three parts of flour, and to every pound of sugar add one grated nutmeg and three eggs. Mix well, and from these ingredients into a dough with melted butter and a little rose-water. Bake in the usual way.
A ratio recipe rather than a measured one, of the kind Cassell's prints when it assumes the cook already knows what a Shrewsbury cake looks like. The proportions work, but the butter is left entirely to judgement and the quantities as given are enormous.
- Read the proportions by weightOne part sugar to three parts flour is a weight ratio, not volume. At the stated scale — a pound of sugar — you are making three pounds of flour's worth of biscuits, several dozen. A quarter batch (4 oz sugar, 12 oz flour, 1 egg, a quarter nutmeg) is a sensible domestic quantity.
- The butter is unspecifiedThis is the one genuine gap. Period Shrewsbury cakes run roughly half the weight of the flour in butter; at the quarter batch above that is about 6 oz. Add the melted butter gradually and stop when the dough just coheres — it should be short and slightly crumbly, not soft.
- Rose-waterUse culinary rose-water, not the cosmetic sort, and use it sparingly: a teaspoon per quarter batch. Strengths vary a great deal between products, and concentrated rose extract in particular will taste of soap if overdone.
- Grate the nutmeg freshOne whole nutmeg to a pound of sugar is about two teaspoons grated, which is assertive by current standards. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatiles; grate a whole one and scale to taste.
- "Bake in the usual way"The book gives no temperature or thickness here. For a rolled sugar biscuit, roll to about a quarter-inch and cut in rounds; a moderate modern oven, around 350F, for 12-15 minutes until the edges are just colouring works well. Keep them pale.
- Melted butter changes the handlingBecause the fat goes in melted rather than rubbed in, the dough firms up as it cools. Chill it 30 minutes before rolling or it will be greasy and hard to lift.
- YieldThe quarter batch gives roughly 24-30 two-inch biscuits. They keep a fortnight in a tin.
Shrewsbury cakes are a Shropshire speciality of long standing — flat, short, sugared biscuits rather than cakes in the modern sense, the older word covering anything baked in a small round. A comparison to the shortness of a Shrewsbury cake is commonly quoted from Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), though the attribution is repeated more often than it is verified; the joke, wherever it originates, depends on an audience that knew the texture. Rose-water and nutmeg mark the recipe's ancestry: both were standard sweet flavourings in English baking from the seventeenth century, before vanilla became cheap and general in the nineteenth. Cassell's gives this as a second method, with no weights beyond a ratio, on the assumption that a cook working from proportions could scale to whatever tin she had. The town's association with the biscuit was commercialised in the nineteenth century by local bakers — Palin's (Pailin's) is the name usually attached, though the trade was wider than one firm.