Pastry, Etc
1. Shrewsbury Cake.
Sift 1 pound of sugar, some pounded cinnamon, and a nutmeg grated, into 3 pounds of flour. Add a little rose-water to 3 eggs well beaten, mix them with the flour, then pour in as much butter melted as will make it a good thickness to roll out. 2. Another. Take 2 pounds of flour, 1 pound of slack oven. 12. Gingerbread.
One pound and a half of flour, 1 pound of sugar, and 1/2 a pound of butter, well rubbed together; 1 ounce of ginger, a few caraway seeds, 24 allspice, 12 cloves, a little cinnamon, 1 pint of molasses.
Knead well. 13. Short Gingerbread.
One pound of sugar, pound of butter, 5 eggs, a little cream and saleratus, 1 pounds of flour, rolled hard. To be baked on tin sheets, marked ready to cut 14. Calves'-foot Jelly.
This page is a run of short pastry receipts as they were set in type, and the text has come down to us damaged: the second Shrewsbury cake breaks off mid-sentence and runs straight into the tail of a later entry, and the numbering jumps from 2 to 12. Treat items 1, 12 and 13 as workable; the rest are fragments.
- What is actually usable hereOnly three receipts survive intact enough to follow: the first Shrewsbury cake, the gingerbread, and the short gingerbread. "2. Another" loses everything after "1 pound of" and "14. Calves'-foot Jelly" is a heading with no method attached.
- Missing quantities in the short gingerbreadThe text reads "pound of butter" and "1 pounds of flour" with the fractions dropped in printing. Half a pound of butter and one and a half pounds of flour are the proportions that make sense against a pound of sugar and five eggs, but the original numbers are lost and this is inference, not transcription.
- SaleratusAn early chemical leavening, sold first as potassium bicarbonate and later as sodium bicarbonate, and the forerunner of modern baking soda. Use baking soda at about a teaspoon per pound and a half of flour, and expect lift with a faint alkaline tang rather than a clean rise unless the cream used is sour enough to react with it.
- "24 allspice, 12 cloves"These are counts of whole berries and whole cloves, to be pounded in a mortar with the ginger and cinnamon. Twenty-four allspice berries grind down to roughly a teaspoon.
- A slack ovenThe phrase surviving in the broken second receipt means a cool oven, about 275-300F. Shrewsbury cakes are meant to dry out pale and crisp rather than colour. The gingerbreads want more, around 325-350F.
- Rose-waterStill sold, but modern distillates vary enormously in strength. Start with a teaspoon beaten into the eggs and taste the raw dough; the strength the receipt assumes cannot be known, so adjust by taste.
- Molasses by the pintA pint of molasses is about 24 ounces by weight, which against a pound and a half of flour makes a very wet, sticky mass. The receipt says to knead it, not beat it.
- ScaleThese are bakery quantities. The first Shrewsbury cake uses three pounds of flour and will give something like eight or nine dozen thin biscuits. Quartering the whole receipt is reasonable for a domestic batch.
- Rolled hard, baked on tin sheets"Marked ready to cut" means scoring the sheet of dough into squares before baking and breaking it along the lines while still warm, rather than stamping out rounds. It is faster and wastes no trimmings.
Shrewsbury cakes are among the older named English biscuits, recorded by the seventeenth century and associated with the Shropshire town. Recipes vary: richness in butter and thinness are usual, and rose-water is one common flavouring alongside caraway. That the same page carries two gingerbreads is unsurprising in receipt books of this period, when molasses was cheap and gingerbread took many forms. The whole spices counted out by the berry suit a kitchen with a mortar rather than a spice tin, and saleratus in the second gingerbread but not the first shows chemical leavening sitting alongside older methods that relied on eggs and hard rolling. The broken sentences and jumping numbers look like damage to the text as it has come down rather than evidence about how the collection was put together.