Skip to main content
Dessert

Shrewsbury Cakes

A buttery biscuit with caraway seeds, made from flour, butter, sugar, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Shrewsbury Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the flour, egg, sugar, and caraway seeds; mix until combined.

  3. Roll out the dough thinly and cut into shapes with a tin cutter.

Bake

  1. Prick the cakes with a fork.

  2. Place on buttered tin plates and bake at 300°F (150°C) until golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it gives the cakes their rich, tender, crumbly texture.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and sets it during baking.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and some structure to the cakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Caraway seeds
Contribute the distinctive aromatic flavour that defines Shrewsbury cakes.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thinly. Thin dough bakes through and turns crisp and short. Thick dough stays soft and dense in the centre and may not brown evenly before the edges overbake.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, egg, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes