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Shrewsbury Cakes

A buttery cookie made with caraway seeds and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 188 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Shrewsbury Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Add the powdered sugar, flour, egg, caraway seeds, and ground cinnamon; mix into a paste.

  3. If the mixture is not stiff enough, add a little more flour.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough thinly and cut with a round cutter.

  2. Prick the cookies all over and bake on a baking sheet.

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. Caraway + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 the sugar, it gives the cookies their rich, tender texture and flavor.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and sets it during baking.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds moisture and richness to the paste.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the dough and dissolves easily into the creamed butter for a fine crumb.
Caraway seeds
Contribute a distinctive aromatic flavor that defines this traditional cookie.

The step that matters

Adding more flour. The dough must be stiff enough to roll out thinly and hold its cut shape. Too much flour makes the cookies dry and tough, while too little makes them spread and lose their shape in the oven.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits about as well
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

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

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