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Shrewsbury Cake (II)
Mrs. Isaac Shannon.
One-half pound of flour, and butter and sugar firmly pounded, one egg, and a teaspoonful of mace; roll them out the size you like; bake them in a slow oven. Excellent.
A four-ingredient shortbread-type biscuit written in the compressed style of a recipe passed between neighbours. Nearly everything hinges on reading the first line correctly.
- The measurement is elliptical"One-half pound of flour, and butter and sugar" most likely means half a pound of each — 8 oz flour, 8 oz butter, 8 oz sugar — though the wording could also be read as half a pound of flour with the butter and sugar left unspecified. Equal weights gives a very rich, soft dough.
- "Firmly pounded"Pounding was done in a mortar. The phrase may mean the butter and sugar were worked together until smooth before the flour went in, or simply that the sugar was pounded fine. Creaming butter and sugar for two or three minutes gives the intended result.
- Slow ovenThe original gives no temperature; "slow" is conventionally taken as roughly 300–325F. These are meant to stay pale — barely coloured at the edges, never browned. At a higher temperature the sugar catches before the centre sets.
- MaceGround mace, the lacy outer coat of the nutmeg, warmer and more floral than nutmeg itself. A teaspoon in this quantity of dough is assertive but correct for the style; half a teaspoon suits modern palates.
- Rolling and cutting"Roll them out the size you like" means the thickness as much as the diameter. Between 1/4 and 1/3 inch, cut into rounds of two to three inches, works well. Chill the rolled dough before cutting; the butter content makes it slump otherwise.
- TimingThe original gives none. At 300F expect 20 to 25 minutes. They will still feel soft when done and firm as they cool, so judge by the underside rather than the top.
- YieldAbout two dozen biscuits at three inches.
Shrewsbury cakes are biscuits, not cakes in the modern sense, and are generally traced to Shropshire, where printed recipes appear from the mid-seventeenth century onward. The early versions are all variations on the same short dough of flour, butter, sugar and egg, distinguished mainly by their flavouring — rosewater, caraway seed, cinnamon, or, as here, mace. A verse in praise of a Shrewsbury baker's cakes, usually credited to R. H. Barham's Ingoldsby Legends, did a good deal to fix the name in English memory, and by the nineteenth century the biscuits were a stock item in household manuals on both sides of the Atlantic. That this collection prints two separate Shrewsbury recipes, each contributed by a different woman under her husband's name, shows how well known the dish had become: the same familiar sweet arrived from several kitchens at once.