Skip to main content
Dessert

Shrewsbury Cakes

A sweet biscuit made with flour, butter, currants, sugar, and liquid, baked until golden.

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

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Shrewsbury Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add currants and sifted sugar.

  3. Wet the mixture with water, cream, or milk until just combined.

  4. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

Bake

  1. Place on buttered and floured baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a slow oven (300°F / 150°C) for about 1 hour and 30 minutes.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once combined with butter and liquid.
Fresh butter
Rubbed into the flour to add richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Sifted sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown during slow baking.
Currants
Add fruit sweetness and chewy pockets throughout the cakes.

The step that matters

Wetting the mixture. Adding liquid only until the dough just comes together keeps it tender. Overworking or adding too much liquid develops gluten and makes the cakes tough and dense.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, cream. 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

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes