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Shrewsbury Cake
1 pound flour. 12 ounces sugar. 12 ounces butter. 2 eggs. Add two tablespoonfuls rose water, or two teaspoonfuls beaten mace. Roll and bake in tin sheets or in an oven.---Mrs. T.
This is a rolled, unleavened butter biscuit in the English style — closer to shortbread than to anything called cake today. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easy to scale.
- The weights1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 cups; 12 oz sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; 12 oz butter is 3 sticks. Weighing is worth it here, since the whole character of the dough is the fat-to-flour ratio.
- No leavening, and that is deliberateThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder. The cakes should stay flat, pale and crisp — "short" was the whole point. Do not add a rising agent to compensate.
- Rose waterStill sold, but modern culinary rose water varies widely in strength. Two tablespoons of a delicate brand is right; with a concentrated Middle Eastern rose water, start with two teaspoons and taste the raw dough.
- Beaten mace"Beaten" means pounded in a mortar, i.e. ground. Two teaspoons of ground mace is assertive by current standards but authentic to the period; blade mace ground fresh is much better than the jar that has sat for two years.
- MixingCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then work in the flour to a stiff paste. It will look dry before it comes together. Chill the dough an hour before rolling or it will be unmanageable.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about 1/4 inch thick and cut in rounds. Thinner gives a snap, thicker a crumbly bite; the dough is forgiving either way and scraps re-roll well.
- "Tin sheets or in an oven"The original is ambiguous; it may distinguish flat tins from baking directly on the oven floor, but the text does not say. The recipe gives no oven heat; in a modern oven around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are just coloured and the centres still pale, works for a dough of this kind.
- YieldThe original gives none. A pound of flour at these proportions makes several dozen 2-inch cakes, depending how thin they are rolled. They should keep well in a tin.
Shrewsbury cakes take their name from the Shropshire town, where they were a local speciality sold to travellers, and printed recipes for them go back to the seventeenth century in English household books, though the earliest references are mentions rather than recipes. The phrase "as short as a Shrewsbury cake" was proverbial in England well before Marion Cabell Tyree collected this version for Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), and its appearance there is a good illustration of how tenaciously Virginia kitchens held to English forms ose water as a flavouring, mace as the alternative, and no vanilla anywhere in sight. Rose water was the standard perfume for sweet baking in Britain and the American colonies long before vanilla extract became cheap and general in the later nineteenth century, so a recipe that still offers it first is either an heirloom or a deliberate conservatism. "Mrs. T." is one of the some two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives whose contributions Tyree's title page credits, most of them named, a collaborative method that turned the book into a sort of collective record of what Virginia households were actually cooking after the Civil War.