My guest today is third generation baker, writer and teacher David Wright author of the excellent book Breaking Bread: How Baking Shaped our World published by Aurum.
We talk about the social benefits of bread making, milling grain into flour, the anatomy of a grain, roller mills, the Chorleywood process and why gluten can be compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.
Those listening to the secret podcast: you get a little over 15 minutes of bonus material that includes additives that don’t have be named on ingredients lists, flatbreads, the National Loaf, the value of bread and more!
Available on all podcast platforms. If you’re not a podcast person, you can stream the episode via the Spotify embed, below:
Remember: Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast and Grant and Matthew are very kindly giving listeners to the podcast a unique special offer 10% off your order until the end of October 2025 – use the offer code Foodhis in the checkout at their online shop, www.fruitpig.co.uk.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or leave a comment below.
For years now, I have wanted to make my own fresh blood black puddings, but fresh blood is so tricky to get hold of in Britain, I thought I would never get the opportunity. Lucky for me then, that Fruit Pig, who are sponsoring the ninth season of The British Food History Podcast, kindly sent me a litre of pig’s blood. When it came to recipes, I very much had my eye on Early Modern black puddings because they seem so outlandish compared to traditional black puddings of today. On one hand, they are very British, containing oatmeal and/or breadcrumbs and plenty of chopped beef suet. On the other, they are reminiscent of a French boudin noir in that there are lashings of cream and egg yolks.
If you haven’t listened to the episode about black and white puddings with Matthew and Grant of Fruit Pig listen here.
Read about the history of puddings in The Philosophy of Puddings
There are lots of unexpected herbs and spices, too. Thomas Dawson uses sheep’s blood, milk-soaked oats, suet and what we might think of as the constituents of a mixed spice today: nutmeg, mace, black pepper, ginger and cinnamon.[1] Sir Kenelm Digby liked to use chicken blood, cream, almond cream, bone marrow, sugar, salt, rosewater and eggs.[2] Robert May gives us some precise pointers as well as several ways of making black puddings. In one recipe he combines blood and cream in a ratio of 2:1. Sometimes he soaks oats in milk, sometimes blood: ‘Steep great oatmeal in eight pints of warm goose blood, sheeps blood, calves, or lambs, or fawns blood’. He uses a whole range of interesting herbs, including thyme, spinach, parsley, sorrel and strawberry leaves, to name but a few. He also adds ‘Sometimes for variety, Sugar, Currans, &c.’[3] I really want to know what sweet black pudding tastes like!
Robert May liked to add currants and sugar to his black puddings ‘for variety’.
Using these descriptions as inspiration, I created the recipe below. There was a certain amount of trial-and-error, and whenever I got stuck, I made sure to gain advice from Regula Ysewijn’s Pride and Pudding, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook and Fergus Henderson’s The Complete Nose to Tail.[4]
I learned a great deal making them – the most important lesson being just how skilled one must be to make these sorts of puddings frequently and in large amounts. It made me appreciate even more the hard work of our forebears and Fruit Pig!
I was really surprised with how well the puddings turned out, and I would certainly recommend giving them a go. I made one batch with sugar and currants and one without. You might be surprised to hear that the sweet one was really quite delicious. I fried my savoury puddings and served them with fried eggs atop some sourdough toast. They tasted rich and were a cross between a black pudding and haggis. I’ll let you know how I served the sweet black puddings.
There are just a couple of things I would have done differently: my main issue was that the butcher gave me pigs’ casings which were not suitable for these black puddings – the nubbly pieces of oat tore through them easily, and the skin burst under their own weight at times. I would therefore recommend beef casings or simply baking them in the oven in loaf tins, or maybe even frying up blood pancakes as suggested by Regula Ysewijn![5]
A big thank you to Matthew and Grant of Fruit Pig for supplying me with fresh blood
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Recipe
Makes approximately 12 x 20 cm black puddings if made in pork casings, and 6 x 20 cm puddings if made in beef casings.
Natural pork or beef skins, soaked in water overnight (optional, see recipe)
The day before you want to make your puddings, place the oats in a bowl or large jug and pour in enough milk to just cover them. Place in the fridge overnight. Grind the spices and mix in the dried herbs and salt.
Next day, place all of the ingredients (aside from the casings, if using) in a large mixing bowl. Combine and allow everything to mingle, dissolve and absorb; around an hour – or more if you have the time.[6]
Once everything has had the chance to macerate and absorb, it is time to assemble the puddings. I used my sausage stuffer funnel from the Kitchen Aid and attached a length of pork casing onto it, then secured it with some string and knotted the end. Then I set about filling the casings, a spoon at a time, letting the skins naturally fill and fall into a bowl. Then I tied a link off with some string, making sure the casing wasn’t full and there were no obvious air bubbles. The lengths of the puddings were around 20 cm – though I wasn’t very consistent. In retrospect, I would recommend using beef casings tied to a wide-mouthed jam funnel, much easier to fill and no constant tearing.
Once all of the mixture is used up, get a large pot of water to a good simmer and gingerly plop them in a few at a time. Three was a good number. Keep the water at a gentle simmer and arm yourself with a pin and pop any bubbles that appear in the cooking puds, lest they burst. They will take around 20 minutes to cook, and you must watch them like a hawk, pin poised and ready to pop. You can tell they are done when the liquid that comes out of a freshly-pricked pudding is clear. If using beef casings, they will take 30 to 35 minutes to cook.
Carefully remove the puddings and either hang them up or lay them on a cooling rack to dry for a few hours before placing them in the refrigerator.
You can avoid all of this faff by baking the mixture in large loaf tins sat in a bain-marie for around 1½ hours at 160°C.[7]
The finished black puddings!
Notes
[1] Dawson, T. (1596). The Good Housewife’s Jewel (1996 Edition). Southover Press.
[2] Digby, K. (1669). The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened (1997 reprint) (J. Stevenson & P. Davidson, Eds.). Prospect Books.
[3] May, R. (2012). The Accomplisht Cook (1660/85) (A. Davidson, M. Bell, & T. Jaine, Eds.; 1685th ed.). Prospect Books.
[4] Fearnley-Whittingstall, H. (2001). The River Cottage Cookbook. Collins; Henderson, F. (2012). The Complete Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking. Bloomsbury; Ysewijn, R. (2015). Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings Savoury and Sweet. Murdoch Books.
[6] Note: Looking back on these initial stages, it would have been much better to soak the oats in the blood overnight, mix everything together in the morning, let everything meld and mingle for a couple of hours, and then add enough milk to make a mixture of a spoonable porridge consistency. We live and learn.
[7] Note: I haven’t tested this method; these instructions have been extrapolated from the Fergus Henderson recipe for blood cake in Henderson (2012).
Photo credits: top left: Cambridge Archaeological Unit; bottom right: Cambridge Archaeological Unit using a foreground photographic image supplied by S. Craythorne/Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust
My guests today are archaeologists Chris Wakefield from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit of Cambridge University Rachel Ballantyne from McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, and they are here to tell me about an absolutely amazing site close to Peterborough that tell us a huge amount about daily life in a late Bronze Age settlement. Prepare to have your minds blown!
We talk about the unique circumstances of how and why the site is so well preserved, kitchen clutter, animal husbandry, querns, frumenty, pike sushi, and whether the English’s love of mustard goes back 3 millennia – among many other things
Those listening to the secret podcast: you get 20 minutes of bonus material that includes the importance of foraging, the evidence for fermentation, Bronze Age recipes, the uses of the whole cereal plant and more!
Available on all podcast apps, just search for ‘The British Food History Podcast’ and hit follow. Or stream via this Spottily embed:
A Must Farm side-view reconstruction (pic: Cambridge Archaeological Unit using a foreground photographic image supplied by S. Craythorne/Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust)
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Area of potsExcavation and scaffoldExcavating the site Arial view of excavationPot in situA tiny pot!The tiny pot in situStacked potsSome images of the excavation and finds (all images by Cambridge Archaeological Unit)
Remember: Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast and Grant and Matthew are very kindly giving listeners to the podcast a unique special offer 10% off your order until the end of October 2025 – use the offer code Foodhis in the checkout at their online shop, www.fruitpig.co.uk.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or on twitter and BlueSky @neilbuttery, or Instagram and Threads dr_neil_buttery. My DMs are open.
In my last post I launched the ninth season of The British Food History Podcast with an episode about Black and White Pudding with Matthew Cockin and Grant Harper (aka Fruit Pig). Not only are they the only remaining craft producer of fresh blood black puddings in Britain, but they are very kindly sponsoring this season of the podcast. Their puddings are exceptional, and Matthew and Grant are very kindly giving readers of the blog and listeners of the podcast 10% off at their online shop (www.fruitpig.co.uk) with the offer code Foodhis, so if you can please support them – if we don’t use producers like Fruit Pig, we will lose them, and that would be a terrible shame. It’s also worth checking with your local butcher – my nearest traditional butcher, Littlewood’s in Heaton Moor, Stockport, the very place where I bought the meat for today’s recipe, stock them – so perhaps yours does too (or you could suggest they do if they don’t!). Have a listen to the episode, if you haven’t already:
Now, I reckon the vast majority of black pudding eaters enjoy theirs as part of a fried breakfast, but I think we need to remember that black puddings can be eaten for any meal, and in the last post I detailed the old traditional way of eating them with mashed potato and apple sauce. Today I am going one better with this delicious and warming Cumbrian Tatie Pot, a hotpot made of lamb, beef and black pudding, pulses and onions, topped not with nice, neat round slices of potato like a Lancashire hotpot, but quartered floury potatoes.[1] It is important that the cheaper, tougher cuts of beef shin and lamb neck are used, and that the hotpot should be cooked long and slow.
The result is a rich and unctuous hotpot that sticks to your ribs and serves plenty of people; it was on the menu at The Buttery in the first year it was open, and it was very popular.[2] Well-flavoured meat cuts like shin and neck require a similarly good-flavoured black pudding like those made by Fruit Pig.
I first heard about this rather decadent one-pot dish from Jane Grigson in her book English Food.[3] I can find only a few other references to it – a regional dish that seems to be rarely cooked today, yet should, in my opinion, be much more popular than it is.
A before and after look at the tatie pot!
Jane was given the recipe from a Mrs Burrows, and in English Food, she tells us that ‘Mrs Burrows said that what interested her was that the tatie pot is one of our few dishes in which different meats are combined, something which is common in mainland Europe.’ Indeed, and assuming your black pudding contains pigs’ blood, then we have three species of mammal altogether; very rare indeed!
Jane Grigson points out that some recipes say that the beef is optional, ‘which it most definitely is not’, she writes, ‘[i]t makes the character of the dish.’ Looking at similar Lakeland recipes available on the Foods of England Project website, there are recipes that contain beef but not lamb (Westmorland tatie pot), and lamb but not beef (Cumberland hotpot). Neither contain pulses, and both have sliced potatoes nicely arranged on top like a Lancashire hotpot.[4] I’m not saying that Jane’s is right and others wrong; it is just interesting to me that everyone has their own correct version of a dish, possibly with slight geographical differences, and usually it’s the one you grew up with, the one that is most familiar to you, that is the ‘right’ one.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Shin of beef (L) and lamb neck (R) are the best cuts for this delicious hotpot
Recipe
The long cook time on this hotpot means that you need to keep the liquid levels topped up. You can use stock or water for this – there is nothing wrong with the latter when cooking with these robust cuts of meat.
2 onions, peeled and sliced, or 2 leeks, trimmed, rinsed and thinly sliced
Around 1.2 kg floury potatoes
Around 800 ml hot light beef, lamb, or chicken stock, or water
Soak the pulses in water overnight (or, if you are badly organised, soak in warm water for 4 or 5 hours).
Preheat your oven to 160°C. Shake the meat, cut into neat chunks, with the cornflour, and scatter the pieces over the base of a large casserole, season with salt and pepper, then tuck in slices of the black pudding. Sprinkle with the onions or leeks and the drained pulses. Peel the potatoes and slice them into quarters lengthways. Arrange the quarters on top; I find it is impossible to do this neatly. Pour over enough stock to go halfway up the potatoes and season them with more salt and pepper.
Building up the layers…
Bake for 4 hours, topping up with more stock or water every hour or so.
Serve with steamed green vegetables or braised red cabbage.
Notes:
[1] Grigson, J. (1992). English Food (Third Edit). Penguin.
[2]The Buttery was my bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Levenshulme, Manchester, open between 2016 and 2017, though it did exist as a pop up restaurant and artisan market stall before that.
[3] For those not in the know, I got into this traditional cookery and food history malarky because I cooked every recipe (well, almost every recipe) in Jane’s wonderful book. This was my first blog Neil Cooks Grigson. Hear about it in this podcast episode from season 8:
Welcome to the first episode of season 9 of The British Food History Podcast! I am going to be adding a blog post to complement each new episode of the podcast, to help readers of the blog keep tabs on what is going on.
Today I am talking with Matthew Cockin and Grant Harper of Fruit Pig – the last remaining commercial craft producer of fresh blood black puddings in the UK.
Fruit Pig are sponsoring the 9th season of the podcast and Grant and Matthew are very kindly giving listeners to the podcast a unique special offer 10% off your order until the end of October 2025 – use the offer code Foodhis in the checkout at their online shop, www.fruitpig.co.uk.
We talk about how and why they started up Fruit Pig, battling squeamishness, why it’s so difficult to make fresh blood black puddings, and serving suggestions – amongst many other things
The podcast is available on all podcast apps, aandd now YouTube. Please give it a follow, and if you can, please rate and review. If you’re not a podcasty person, you can listen via this Spotify imbed:
Some serving suggestions
One other thing we talked about was serving suggestions, and of course a slice or two of black and white pudding as part of a full English breakfast is admirable. You can go one better and have the full triple of black pud, white and haggis for a full Scottish! Personally, I believe a slice of fried bread topped with a couple of slices of fried pudding and a poached egg is the breakfast of champions.
These puddings are not just for breakfast, though. In Lancashire, a favourite way of eating black pudding is to poach it again, remove it from the water, drain, split lengthways and spread it with mustard. I have eaten it this way when visiting Bury Market. But my favourite way of eating black and white pudding in a simple way, is to serve fried slices of pudding with mashed potatoes and apple sauce – hot or cold, not too sweet. Here’s how to make a good ‘savoury’ apple sauce:
Peel, core and slice 2 medium-sized Bramley apples, and 2 tart dessert apples (e.g. Cox’s Orange Pippin) and fry in a saucepan with 60 g salted butter and a good few grinds of pepper. When the Bramleys start to soften, add 2 level tablespoons of sugar and 4 or 5 tablespoons of water. Cover and cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are cooked through and the Bramleys have broken down to a puree. Taste and correct seasoning. You need something still very tart to cut through the rich puddings.
Keep a lookout for a proper recipe and some of my experiments with the fresh blood, Matthew and Grant kindly sent me.
If you can, support the podcast and blogs by becoming a £3 monthly subscriber, and unlock lots of premium content, including bonus blog posts and recipes, access to the easter eggs and the secret podcast, or treat me to a one-off virtual pint or coffee: click here.
Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or leave a comment below.
At the Awards! L-R: Nina Lewis, Neil Buttery, Kate Travers, Martin Driscol and Kirsty Hopkinson
I have some very exciting news to share! The project that I worked on with the Museum of Royal Worcester in 2023-2024 won the Food on Display award at the inaugural British Library Food Season Awards on the 9th of June.
The judges were chef, writer and television presenter Nadiya Hussain, Food Historian and Curator at the Library, Polly Russell, Scent Designer and Food Historian Tasha Marks and Elly Magson, Senior Interpretation Manager at the Library. A big thank you to all of them, and we’re so glad the project has been recognised in this way.
The judges were all drawn to the detail and creativity of Dr Wall’s Dinner at the Museum of Royal Worcester. The display and accompanying programme explored several interesting narratives around Georgian Dining, in a way that was both educational and visually striking. It was a wonderful example of how food can be used to animate a collection and reach different audiences.
Judges (L to R): Polly Russell, Elly Magson and Tasha Marks
There were several elements to the project, including the recreation of an 18th-century dining table, one that the founder of Worcester Porcelain – Dr Wall – might have enjoyed, including some very realistic fake food made by Kerry Samantha Boyes of the Fake Food Workshop in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. I also delivered some historical food workshops, making junkets with Key Stage 2 pupils; historical pies and pasties with the Hospitality & Catering students at the Heart of Worcester College; and plum pudding workshops with adults. A heady mix!
There was too the Worcestershire LitFest & Fringe, who, as a group, took inspiration and created original poems celebrating the ‘Language of porcelain and food’. Many of these are on display in the museum.
A huge thank you to everyone who was involved, especially Natasha Wilcockson who put in so much groundwork bringing together so many different people and keeping us all driving it forward.
The aim of the project wasn’t to show off the lovely porcelain – the museum was already a fantastic job – the aim was to explore the ways in which the porcelain was used and who was interacting with it: from the cooks in the kitchen to the guests sat around the table itself.
To kick off the project, I gave an online talk on the subject which can be watched here:
A couple of posts ago I gave you my recipe for scones. As with many foods, there is a variety of baked things that are called scones, which can cause a certain amount of confusion (see also: pudding[1], bun and cake[2]). My recipe is for what I think most people would consider a ‘proper’ scone: cakey, slightly dry and crumbly and therefore served spread with lashings of jam and butter or clotted cream. In other words, the scone one receives when ordering a cream tea. Despite its modern link with Devon and Cornwall, the scone most certainly originated in Scotland. These scones were baked not in ovens but on girdles/griddles or bakstones/bakestones, and there are two main types: those made from a runny batter and baked on a lightly greased griddle, often called drop scones today, or ‘Scotch’ pancakes outside of Scotland.[3] The second type is more cakelike; a dough that may be shaped into one large round and baked whole as a bannock, or cut into triangles as scones. The scones may also have been made by rolling out the dough and cutting out rounds. However they were shaped, these scones were cooked on a lightly-floured girdle.[4]
Wheaten bread may have been used in both types of scone, but more often they were made from oats or barley and sometimes peasemealin the very north of Scotland.[5] For delicious potato scones, some of the wheat flour is replaced with leftover mashed potatoes. Scones are typically chemically raised with bicarbonate of soda activated usually with soured buttermilk, but seeing as the word scone goes as far back as the early 16th century, this cannot have always been so; chemical raising agents were not widely available until the latter half of the 18th century. I do see recipes that use yeast and others with no leavening at all. I strongly suspect that the early scones would have been made with sourdoughs.
This is a sowans scone – made with the sour liquid poured off from fermenting sowans instead of the usual cultured buttermilk
Recipes begin to travel south and cross the border. Jane Grigson mentions a Northumbrian scone that is made with wholewheat flour and is leavened by yeast.[6] F. Marion McNeill, writing in the 1920s observes that ‘scones [are] popular in England now, but there are no recipes in Beeton’s book’, meaning – of course – the fantastically comprehensive Beeton’s Book of Household Management of 1861.[7] There are several recipes for scones in Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1883) and Robert Wells’ Pastry & Confectioners’ Guide (1892).[8] Interestingly, none of them are baked in ovens despite many homes having ovens by this point in history.
However, in Good Things in England (1932), that wonderful collection of traditional English recipes by Florence White, there are recipes for scones baked both in ovens and on griddles. A variety of flours are being used too, including oatmeal and ‘Maize or Indian Meal’.[9] Baked scones – in England, at least – quickly take over and usurp not only the griddlecake variety of scones, but also the Devonshire/Cornish split in the cream tea.[10] But in the 21st century, these baked scones move even further away from their origins – egg is added for richness, milk is used over the now tricky to find buttermilk (in combination with baking powder).
For many folk, scones will be forever associated with the south-western peninsula of England, but it is important to remember, as Catherine Brown and Laura Mason put it in The Taste of Britain (1999): ‘Few English people would appreciate that [scones are] as Scottish as oatmeal porridge.’[11] I hope you appreciate it now!
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information.Thank you.
[2] These are discussed in my book Knead to Know: A History of Baking (2024).
[3] These griddlecakes are also the forerunner to the sublime fluffy American pancake
[4] Buttery, N. (2024). Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Icon Books; McNeill, F. M. (1968). The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore & Recipes (2nd ed.). Blackie & Son Limited.
[5] Buttery, N. (2018, April 17). Pease Pancakes. British Food: A History.
[6] Grigson, J. (1992). English Food (Third Edit). Penguin. I have – of course – cooked this recipe as part of my Neil Cooks Grigson project all the way back in 2008. I didn’t do a very good job of it and it requires a revisit. Read the original post here.
A hospitable Yorkshire housewife would consider her tea table was barely spread if it were not liberally supplied with these delicious cakes, constant relays of which should be served steaming hot.
A split and toasted fruit teacake, liberally spread with melting salted butter is one of life’s simple pleasures. For those of you who are not already in the know, a Yorkshire teacake is a round, slightly flattened, enriched, soft breadcake usually containing a little sugar, spice, dried fruit, and candied peel. There was a time when England had scores of regional fruited or enriched bread cakes and loaves, but they have largely gone by the wayside. Others that spring to mind are Bath buns, Wiltshire lardy cakes and Lincolnshire plum bread.[2] These types of cakes and breads are much more appreciated in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, or so it seems. The Yorkshire teacake has escaped its regional roots, so much so that it has lost its Yorkshire identifier and is simply called a teacake by most people.
Just-baked teacakes with plenty of salted butter
Yorkshire teacakes can be traced back to the opening decades of the 18th century when they were called ‘Yorkshire Cakes’. They will have been very expensive because they are enriched with eggs, butter, milk, and plenty of sugar and dried fruits.[3] By the 1880s, they are called Yorkshire teacakes.[4]
Working-class families enjoyed them too, but there was invariably less fruit, just a touch of sugar, half-and-half milk and water, no eggs and lard instead of butter. I like this more austere version, though I do go will all milk (full fat, of course) and much prefer lard to often over rich butter. Looking through recipes, the amount of lard varies greatly from a knob to over five ounces per pound of flour.
It’s very important that the teacakes are nice and soft. To achieve this, heed this excellent advice from Florence White:
Immediately after taking from the oven, rub over with buttered paper, and cover with a light, clean blanket; this gives a soft skin.[5]
When they are freshly baked they are lovely eaten untoasted, but any older than that and they must be split and toasted (or if you want to go hardcore Yorkshire, strong Cheddar cheese[6]).
It occurred to me that I hadn’t baked a batch of teacakes for a good few years, and I was thereafter craving them, so I baked a batch. They are so worth making at home and I give you my recipe, should you fancy having a go yourself.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information.Thank you.
Recipe
This is quite a sticky dough and I would recommend making this in a stand mixer with a dough hook, but they can be made without one; just be prepared to be very sticky in the first 10 minutes of kneading. If you prefer plain teacakes, omit the fruit and spice and add half the sugar.
Makes 8 teacakes:
500 g strong plain flour, plus extra for kneading and shaping
30 g caster sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast
½ tsp mixed spice or ½ a grated nutmeg
80 g softened lard or butter, or a mixture
300 ml warm milk or half-and-half milk and water
Around 2 tbs vegetable or sunflower oil
80 g mixed dried fruit
30 g candied peel (optional)
Extra milk for brushing
Add the flour, sugar, salt, yeast and spices to a mixing bowl, make a well in the centre and add the softened fat, then tip in the warm liquid. Using a kneading hook, mix the ingredients on a slow speed until everything has combined, then turn up the speed a notch or two and knead for about 10 minutes until smooth – it won’t be very elastic because of the lashings of lard.
If you want to do this by hand, mix the ingredients with a wooden spoon. When thoroughly mixed, leave it to stand for 15 minutes or so; this gives the flour to absorb some of the liquid making for easier hand kneading. Knead on a lightly floured surface for around 15 minutes.
Brush a clean mixing bowl with the vegetable oil, gather up the floppy dough as best as you can (oil your hands, it makes this bit much easier), tuck it into a ball and pop it in the oiled bowl. Cover with a tea towel or cling film until it has doubled in size. This will take a while; even sat close to the radiator, my dough took over two hours.
Now take two baking sheets and line them with greaseproof paper and set aside.
Tip the dough onto a floured worktop and press out into a square, add the fruit and knead it into the dough. You do this step in the oiled bowl if you like. When everything is reasonably equally distributed, cut the dough into 8 equal-sized pieces. Using just a very little flour roll the pieces of dough into tight balls, then roll them out into circles with a floured rolling pin so they are 4 to 5 cm thick. Sit them on your baking sheets as you make them.
When you’ve done all 8, cover them with tea towels or place a container over them so they can prove again. In my experience the second proving takes about half the time of the first. As they prove turn your oven to 200°C fan (or equivalent). If you have a steam setting on your oven, use it. If you don’t, place a roasting tin in the bottom of the oven to heat up, and when you put your teacakes in the oven, tip some water into the now very hot tin and close the door.
Before and after the second proving
When they have doubled in size, brush them with milk and pop them in the oven. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until golden brown. Test whether they are ready by tapping the base of one: it should sound hollow.
Remove the teacakes from the oven and immediately throw a double layer of tea towels over them to keep them soft as they cool.
At the end of 2024, I gave you my recipe for Bakewell pudding. The plan was to follow with my recipe for Bakewell tart. Alas, life, Christmas and then a holiday to New Zealand got in the way.
But I always get around to things eventually and I give it to you today!
The Bakewell tart, despite it being dearly loved by Brits, was originally made as a cheap, dumbed-down version of the rich Derbyshire pudding: the puff pastry swapped for shortcrust, and the buttery almond filling swapped for an almond-flavoured sponge cake.
I write about the histories of the Bakewell pudding and tart in Knead to Know: A History of Baking, so pick up a copy if you want to know more.
I have been using this recipe for years now and it’s a real crowd-pleaser. When the restaurant was open, I served this tart warm with a lemon-flavoured cream and received a big bear hug from a diner: there could have been no better seal of approval in my book! The secret to its success is that I make a frangipane rather than a sponge cake filling, bound together with just a tablespoon of flour.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce and would to start a £3 monthly subscription, or would like to treat me to virtual coffee or pint: follow this link for more information.Thank you.
Recipe
Makes 1 x 21 cm/8 inch tart
For the sweet shortcrust pastry:
200 g plain flour
100 g salted butter, diced (or half-and-half butter and lard)
50 g caster or icing sugar
1 egg, well beaten
Cold water (see recipe)
For the filling:
100 g salted butter, softened
100 g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g ground almonds
30 g self-raising flour
¼ tsp almond extract
3 or 4 tbs raspberry jam
30 g slivered almonds
First, make the pastry: Place the flour and fat(s) in a mixing bowl and rub the fat in until the mixture resembles fresh breadcrumbs. You can do this by hand using fingertips or with the flat beater of a stand mixer on a slow speed. Make a well in the centre and add most of the egg. If using a stand mixer, slowly mix it in, pouring more egg into any dry patches. If doing by hand, use a butter knife to mix (this prevents overworking of the dough). You should have a cohesive dough that can be brought together with your hand – if it does seem dry, add a tablespoon of cold water.
Knead briefly, cover and allow to rest in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 180°C and place a baking tray on the centre shelf
On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the pastry to the thickness of a pound coin, and use it to line an 8”/20 cm loose-bottomed tart tin or ring.[1] Prick the base with a fork and place it back in the fridge to firm up.
Now make the filling: using a hand beater or stand mixer, beat together the soft butter, caster sugar, eggs, almonds, flour and extract until smooth.
Take the pastry out of the fridge and spread jam over the bottom leaving a centimetre gap all around the inside edge. Spoon or pipe the mixture first around the edges and then the centre (this stops the jam from rising up the sides of the pastry lining), levelling off with a spatula.
Sprinkle with the slivered almonds and slide the tart onto the hot baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes, turning the heat down to 160°C if the top gets too brown. Cool on a rack, and remove from the tin when just warm.
[1] You will find that there is excess pastry – make some nice jam tarts or turnovers.
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