Shrewsbury Cake

History

The Shrewsbury cake Amelia Simmons gives is a rich, short biscuit-cake: a full pound of butter creamed with three-quarters of a pound of sugar and a little mace, bound with four eggs beaten till very light, then worked into just one pound of flour, rolled thin, cut into small cakes, and baked in a light oven. With as much butter as flour and no leavening, it bakes crisp and crumbling rather than risen.

The cake takes its name from Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire in England, and it reaches Simmons's 1796 American Cookery with a long English pedigree already behind it. The earliest known written reference to Shrewsbury cakes dates to 1602, and the recipe appears in early English cookbooks such as The Compleat Cook of 1658. By 1700 it was familiar enough to serve as a stock simile: in William Congreve's The Way of the World a character tells 'brother Wilfull of Salop' that he 'may be as short as a Shrewsbury cake' — a pun on 'short,' the very crumbling, buttery texture Simmons's proportions still aim at, and a nod to the Shropshire (Salop) home of the sweet.

What the record does not keep is how this English regional cake travelled into Simmons's kitchen, or why her hand seasons it with mace alone where other cooks reached for nutmeg or cinnamon; nor whether, in her America, it was an everyday bake or one kept for company. The name and the cake's centuries in English cookery are documented; the path of this particular version is not.

Ingredients

• 1 pound butter
• 3/4 pound sugar
• mace
• 4 eggs
• 1 pound flour

Instructions

1. Mix and beat one pound butter, three quarters of a pound sugar, a little mace, and four eggs with your hand until very light.
2. Put the composition to one pound flour.
3. Roll into small cakes.
4. Bake with a light oven.