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Shrewsbury Cake
Clara Smith.
One cup butter, two of brown sugar, five eggs (not divided), one cup milk, four of flour, one of raisins, spice to taste; use Cook's Friend in the flour; bake three hours.
A contributed recipe written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing: no pan size, no oven heat, no quantity of leavening. Read it as a large spiced raisin butter cake rather than the crisp Shrewsbury biscuit the name suggests.
- Cook's FriendA Canadian brand of proprietary baking powder, sold in Canada in the later nineteenth century. Substitute plain double-acting baking powder; the amount is not given, so use about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour, i.e. 4 teaspoons for the 4 cups here.
- "Five eggs (not divided)"An instruction, not a parenthesis. Many cakes of the period called for whites beaten separately and folded in; here the whole eggs go in together, beaten into the creamed butter and sugar.
- Cup and flour measuresThe cups are broadly comparable to a modern 8 oz cup, though period cups varied. Nineteenth-century flour was usually measured scooped and unsifted, so weigh if you can: 4 cups is roughly 500-560 g, 2 cups brown sugar about 400 g, 1 cup butter 225 g.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; cooks judged the heat of a wood- or coal-fired oven by hand and experience. A three-hour bake implies a slow oven, so somewhere around 300-325F in a deep pan is a reasonable modern equivalent; anything hotter will set the crust long before the centre cooks.
- Pan and timingThis is a large batter, on the order of 4 lb of it. A 9- or 10-inch tube pan or two loaf tins is right. Three hours is credible for one deep pan but not for two loaves, which are likely to be done in considerably less; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Spice to tasteNutmeg and cinnamon, sometimes with a little mace or clove, are the spices most often seen in raisin cakes of this period. Around 2 teaspoons of mixed spice suits this quantity of batter.
- RaisinsToss the cup of raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they will settle to the bottom during the long slow bake.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days, and like most butter-and-spice cakes it improves on the second day.
The name is borrowed rather than inherited. A true Shrewsbury cake, named for the Shropshire town and recorded in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, is a thin crisp butter biscuit flavoured with nutmeg or caraway and rolled out to be cut in rounds. By the time the name crossed the Atlantic it was sometimes attached to richer, spiced, sometimes fruited cakes, and this contribution from Clara Smith belongs with those rather than with the biscuit: a large slow-baked raisin loaf with nothing biscuit-like about it. The recipe's mention of Cook's Friend, a chemical baking powder sold in Canada, helps place it. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from recipes sent in by named local women, and its pages are full of such brand references.