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Shrewsbury Cakes
(England.) Mix 1 pound powdered sugar with 2 pounds flour, add nutmeg and some caraway seeds,--currants may be used instead,--2 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, and 6 ounces melted butter. Roll out very thin, cut into diamonds, and bake. These are very fine, and will keep a long while in a tin box.
A very plain English biscuit dough with only one real difficulty: as written it is exceptionally lean, and the flour figure is almost certainly generous even by period standards. Read the dough, not the numbers.
- The ratio is the hingeTwo pounds of flour against one pound of sugar, six ounces of butter and two eggs will be very dry and may not come together as a rollable dough. Most historical Shrewsbury cake recipes are considerably richer, often around half the flour's weight in butter; work in a quarter of the flour at a time and stop when the dough just coheres, or add a spoonful or two of milk to bind.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means sugar pounded fine from a loaf, roughly today's caster or superfine sugar. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will give a chalky, pale biscuit.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. For a modern oven, 350F; thin diamonds take 8 to 12 minutes and are done when the edges are just tan.
- Roll thin, and mean itA scant 1/8 inch suits the instruction to "roll out very thin" and the diamond cut. Thicker biscuits stay soft in the middle and keep less well in the tin, and keeping is what the recipe claims for them.
- Caraway or currantsCaraway seed is the flavouring found in the earlier recipes; a rounded teaspoon to this quantity goes a long way, as the seed strengthens on standing. If using currants instead, allow about 4 to 6 ounces and chop or halve them so they do not tear the thin dough.
- NutmegGrate it fresh; half a nutmeg for the full quantity. Pre-ground nutmeg goes flat and these biscuits have nothing else to hide behind.
- Beating the eggs separatelyThere is no chemical leavening here, so the whipped whites are the only lift. Fold them in last and handle the dough lightly, though the rolling will knock most of the air out regardless.
- Scale and yieldThe full quantity is a household batch of several dozen biscuits, and it is worth quartering. Cool completely before tinning, or trapped steam will soften them within a day.
Shrewsbury cakes are one of the oldest named English biscuits, appearing in print by the seventeenth century and referred to as a familiar luxury in Restoration writing; caraway and nutmeg are often said to have been the original flavouring rather than currants, though early recipes vary, and the dough belongs to the same family as the shortbreads and "jumbles" that filled a tin between bakings. Their later fame is usually traced to a Shrewsbury baker named Palin, whom Richard Harris Barham praised in the Ingoldsby Legends, first published from 1837, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented and the biscuit clearly predates him by generations. Here it appears tagged simply "(England.)", reduced to a few lines on the assumption that the reader already knew what a rolled sugar biscuit ought to look like.