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| Another gratuitous shot of the flowers from Matt. Not like I'm bragging. |
Of the baking recipes, I don't have the leavener needed for her cookies and many of her breads. This is a solvable problem, but I haven't yet solved it. For the cookies, Amelia uses pearl ash to create carbon dioxide in her recipes, thus getting a rise out of her cookies and cakes. Pearl ash was an early precursor to the baking soda and baking powder we use today, but the chemical properties of it are different so substituting baking soda in Amelia's recipes won't quite do the trick. For her other bread recipes, Amelia calls for something called "emptins" as the leavener. She also describes how to make emptins: Take a handful of hops and about three quarts of water, let it boil about fifteen minutes, then make a thickening as you do for ftarch, ftrain the liquor, when cold put a little emptins to work them, they will keep well cork'd in a bottle five or fix weeks." Since Matt's semester is over, I think he'll start brewing again, so the next time we go to the brewery supply store I can pick up some extra hops to make the emptins. But until then, I have neither pearl ash nor emptins. Many other early recipes call for beating by hand "for an hour" to incorporate air into the batter. Unsurprisingly, that is not appealing.
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| Mace from the Spice Islands - given to me by a friend who works there. |
So that didn't leave many options. Of the recipes left, and with some input from my resident cookie monster, I decided to make Shrewfbury Cakes. Though called "cakes" these sweets are rolled out and baked like cookies. And, just to share, this is the song running through my head ever since I named this post. Here's Amelia's original recipe:
Shrewfbury Cakes
One pound butter, three quarters of a pound fugar, a little mace, four eggs mixed and beat with your hand, till very light, put the compofition to one pound flour, roll into fmall cakes - bake with a light oven.
N.B. In all cafes where fpices are named, it is fuppofed that they be pounded fine and fifted; fugar muft be dryed and rolled fine; flour, dryed in an oven; eggs well beat or whipped into a raging foam.
Fun fact: until around the 1880s, recipes were written in paragraph form, rather than separated into an ingredients list and instructions, as they commonly are today.
Anyway, since a pound of butter seems like it will make a whole bunch more Shrewfbury Cakes than I want, I decided to halve the recipe. And off we go! I'd like to note, though, that I'm not particularly interested in being precisely historically accurate with this recipe. I'm more interested in adapting the recipe to a modern kitchen, which I'd bet is what Amelia did with old recipes passed down to her. Tis the nature of cooking, I suppose, to continually adapt a basic recipe to suit your needs. At least, tis the nature of my cooking.
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| Weighing flour. |
I broke out the trusty kitchen scale for this recipe, and then converted it into volume measurements for those of you wishing to try this at home. Lacking a mortar and pestle, I ground the mace in a coffee grinder (thoroughly wiped cleaned first). I also decided to use the hand mixer. I've made cookies completely by hand before, with no mixer, and am not looking to repeat the experience (though they did come out well).
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| The finished dough. |
Aiming to be historically accurate when it pleases me, I used evaporated cane juice for the sugar rather than regular granulated sugar. While both come from sugar cane, evaporated cane juice is less refined and contains more nutrients than regular white sugar (making it practically health food). It seems likely to me that the sugar Amelia used was less refined than the sugar I usually use, so I was happy to make this switch. I did not, however, dry my flour in the oven first.
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| Rolled out and ready to go. |
Amelia's instructions say to roll the dough into small cakes to bake them. To me, that means 'roll them out like you would a sugar cookie.' Which I did. The only problem is that the dough is really soft. Look at those proportions in the recipe - that's a cup of butter and two eggs to not quite two cups of flour - it's a much softer dough than a standard sugar cookie. I thoroughly floured my worksurface, but the dough still stuck everywhere. Knowing that chilled dough is easier to work with, I covered it in plastic and popped it in the fridge.
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| These ones were rolled out. |
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| These ones were not. Not super different, right? |
"Amelia didn't have a refrigerator," said Matt, when he saw what I was doing. I explained the difficulty I was having rolling the dough out, and he asked to look at the recipe. His interpretation was to roll the dough into small balls and bake it that way. So I tried that. They looked pretty much the same - the dough is so soft that it spreads quite a bit, even when chilled and rolled into a ball. Based on that assessment, I was interested to see what would happen if I just dropped them onto the sheet, like you would a chocolate chip cookie. The same. They spread into a round-ish disc. Rolling them controls the spread a bit, and results in a neater edge, but I don't think the effort is necessarily worth it since I don't think they are appreciably better that way - I mean, they taste the same.
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| Oh no! I dropped the dough! Haha. I am so funny. |
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| The finished cookies. Oops, I mean, cakes. |
Old-timey Shrewsbury Cakes, in a new-timey kitchen
1/2 lb. (1 cup) butter, softened
6 oz. (2/3 cup plus 5 tsp.) sugar
2 eggs, well beaten
1/2 tsp ground mace
8 oz. (5 2/3 cup plus 1/4 cup) flour
With hand mixer, beat butter and sugar on medium speed til combined. Add mace and eggs. Beat until light and fluffy. Stir in flour, being sure to mix well. Refrigerate dough about an hour.
Preheat oven to 315 (Amelia calls for a light oven. A moderate oven is around 350, and I figured a light one should be between there and 300.). Drop teaspoonfuls of dough onto parchment lined sheets, bake 10-12 minutes, or until lightly browned on edges (but not too brown!).
Makes about 40 cookies.
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| They're so pretty! |
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