Shrewsbury cakes are a kind of biscuit (indeed occasionally known as Shrewsbury biscuits) of the shortbread type, made from flour, sugar, and butter, circular, fairly thin, and with scalloped edges. They are flavoured with spices, and sometimes rosewater. The earliest recorded recipe, given by Murrell (1621) uses nutmeg and rosewater.
A monograph on Shrewsbury cakes written by a Shrewsbury historian (Lloyd and Lloyd, 1931) throws light on their early history. Since the 17th century Shrewsbury cakes always appear to have been known for their crisp, brittle texture, which is referred to by one Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who sent his guardian in 1602 ‘a kind of cake which our countrey people use and made in no place in England but in Shrewsbury … Measure not my love by substance of it, which is brittle, but by the form of it which is circular.’
By the end of the 17th century, the cakes were sufficiently well known for the playwright Congreve, in The Way of the World (1700), to use the expression ‘as short as a Shrewsbury cake’, and for poets and musicians born in the W. Midlands to use them as motifs in their work. The recipe given by Eliza Smith (1734) calls for cinnamon as well as nutmeg.
A reference to the biscuits in the popular 19th-century series of poems The Ingoldsby Legends ensured their further fame. One of the poems therein mentions a maker of Shrewsbury cakes named Pailin; and a trade mark ‘Pailin’s Original Shrewsbury Cakes’ was in use by the late 19th century.
Similar ‘short cakes’, of a crisp, friable texture, variously flavoured, were known in other parts of Britain.
© the Estate of Alan Davidson 1999, 2006, 2014 © in the Editor’s contribution to the second and third editions, Oxford University Press 2006, 2014.
