Home › Cake Making and Baking › Shrewsbury Cakes
Shrewsbury Cakes
Sift 1 pound sugar, some pounded cinnamon and a nutmeg grated into 3 pounds of Five Roses flour (sifted). Add a little rose water to 3 eggs (well beaten) and mix with the flour, etc. Then pour into it as much melted butter as will make it of a good thickness to roll out.
Mould well and roll thin. Cut into desired shapes with a biscuit cutter. 3 eggs 1½ cups sugar 1 cup butter ½ cup milk
An old English recipe carried into a Canadian flour-mill cookbook, printed with almost no guidance on quantities of fat or oven heat. Two things need settling before you start: how much butter, and what the stray ingredient list at the end is doing there.
- The doubled ingredient listThe four lines at the end (3 eggs, 1½ cups sugar, 1 cup butter, ½ cup milk) do not match the 3-pound batch described in the paragraph, which uses no milk at all. It reads as a second, scaled-down version set beside the old text, or a compositor's leftover. Work from one or the other, not both.
- Scale of the large versionThree pounds of flour is roughly 11 cups, with 1 lb (about 2¼ cups) sugar and only 3 eggs to bind it. That is a batch for a household baking day, easily eight to ten dozen thin cakes. Quartering it is sensible for a modern kitchen.
- "As much melted butter as will make it of a good thickness"The only measure given for the fat is the feel of the dough. For 3 lb flour expect somewhere near 1 to 1¼ lb butter; add it warm and in stages until the crumbs come together into a stiff, short paste that holds when pressed. It should not be soft enough to slump.
- Rose waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries or the baking aisle; strengths vary considerably between brands, so add cautiously. A teaspoon or two beaten into the eggs is enough for a large batch; more turns the cakes soapy.
- "Mould well"Here it means working the paste smooth by hand rather than shaping it. Shrewsbury cakes are meant to be short and snappy, so knead only until it coheres — extended working develops gluten and gives a tough biscuit.
- Roll thinAbout 3 to 4 mm, near ⅛ inch. These are a crisp thin biscuit, not a soft cookie, and thickness is what decides the texture more than anything else in the method.
- OvenNone is stated. A moderate oven, 350F, on ungreased or parchment-lined sheets, 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. Pull them when the edges are pale gold and the centres still look underdone; they crisp as they cool.
- Nutmeg and cinnamonA whole grated nutmeg across 3 lb flour is about 2 to 2½ teaspoons — assertive but in period. Scale it down with the rest of the batch rather than keeping it whole.
Shrewsbury cakes are a Shropshire biscuit of long standing, and they are named in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), the play's Shropshire character notwithstanding. The defining flavourings in the older recipes are nutmeg, cinnamon and rose water, all three of which survive intact here even though rose water appears to have been uncommon in everyday North American baking by the time the Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Its presence, along with the archaic pound weights and the instruction to add butter by judgement rather than measure, suggests a recipe copied down from an older manuscript or English cookbook and dropped into a promotional flour book with a modern-style ingredient list tacked on the end — a small snapshot of the moment when household baking was shifting from the practised hand to the measuring cup.