Category Archives: food

01/08/2025 · 1:40 pm

A Recipe for Early Modern Black Puddings

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.

600 g pinhead oats

Milk (see recipe)

1 tsp fennel seeds

½ tsp cloves

½ tsp black peppercorns

3 blades of mace

1 ½ tsp dried, mixed herbs

2 tsp salt

900 ml fresh pig’s blood (or reconstituted dried blood)

600 ml double cream

200 g chopped beef suet

2 whole eggs, beaten

140 g currants (optional)

320 g sugar (optional)

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]

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.

[5] Ysewijn (2015)

[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).

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Filed under Britain, cooking, food, General, history, Meat, Puddings, Recipes

Tagged as black pudding, blood, Early Modern Period, food, history, meat, offal, pudding, recipe, The Stuarts, Tudor

30/07/2025 · 8:08 am

Bronze Age Food & Foodways with Chris Wakefield & Rachel Ballantyne

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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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.

This episode was mixed and engineered by Thomas Ntinas of the Delicious Legacy podcast.

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.

You can also join the British Food: a History Facebook discussion page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/britishfoodhistory

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Tagged as archaeology, Bronze Age, food, history, Podcast, podcasts, prehistory, The British Food History Podcast

11/07/2025 · 1:56 pm

Cumbrian Tatie Pot (aka Cumberland or Westmorland Hotpot)

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.

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.

Serves 8

4 tbs dried split peas or mixed pulses

750 g shin of beef

750 g lamb neck (‘scrag end’ of neck)

1 level tablespoon of cornflour

Salt and pepper

One 350 g Fruit Pig black pudding

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.

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:

[4] Hughes, G. Tatie Pot. The Foods of England Project; https://foodsofengland.info/tatiepotorcumberlandhotpot.html.

Black & White Pudding with Matthew Cockin & Grant Harper

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 9^th 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.

This episode was mixed and engineered by Thomas Ntinas of the Delicious Legacy podcast.

Things mentioned in today’s episode

Fruit Pig on Jamie & Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast

Fruit Pig on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme

The Fruit Pig website

Neil’s appearance on Comfortably Hungry discussing black/blood pudding

Museum of Royal Worcester project wins a British Library Food Season Award

Follow Serve it Forth on Instagram at @serveitforthfest

My YouTube channel

Podcast episodes pertinent to today’s episode

The Philosophy of Puddings with Neil Buttery, Peter Gilchrist & Lindsay Middleton:

18^th Century Female Cookery Writers with The Delicious Legacy:

Neil’s books:

Before Mrs Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper

A Dark History of Sugar

Knead to Know: a History of Baking

The Philosophy of Puddings

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Filed under Britain, food, General, Meat, Puddings

Tagged as black pudding, blood, food, haggis, meat, offal, podcasts, pudding, The British Food History Podcast, white pudding

20/06/2025 · 6:54 am

Saffron Buns

Saffron-scented buns, breads and cakes used to be enjoyed right across England from at least the 17th century. Today, however, they are typically found in bun form and are associated with Cornwall because, from around the 1780s, saffron was only grown in this area and Essex.[1]

A modern-day saffron bun is a lovely egg yolk yellow and has that lovely, unique earthy flavour associated with the spice. Other ingredients usually include mixed spice, dried fruit and a little sugar, and e enriched with a good amount of egg and clotted cream, though as Sam Bilton points out in Fool’s Gold: A History of British Saffron, Sarah Harrison’s 18th-century recipe contains no fruit, and the only spice used aside from saffron is coriander seed.[2] Early recipes are usually for single, large cakes such as Sir Kenelm Digby’s ‘excellent cake’, which is baked in a hoop and requires ‘a Peck of fine flower’. It’s enriched with (amongst other things) ‘one pint of Sack…half a pint of Rose-water [and] half a quarter of an ounce of Saffron.’ It is then iced with sugar and egg whites flavoured again with rose water.[3] Rosewater seems to have been a key ingredient because it’s still used a century later in John Farley’s London Art of Cookery (1783) and again in Cassell’s Dictionary of Food a century after that.[4] Perhaps it should be brought back?

Sir Kenhelm Digby’s ‘excellent’ saffron cake also contained rose water

Because of their expensive and rich ingredients, saffron buns are associated with celebrations and feast days. On Good Friday (a day associated with spiced buns), they were cut with a cross and brushed with a saffron wash and eaten with clotted cream.[5] At Christmastime, they were made into miniature cottage loaf shapes. They were also a special taste of home: folk of Newquay, when putting together Christmas food parcels to be sent to fighters during the Great War, were sure to include saffron cakes and buns.[6]

If you want to know more about the history of baking, check out my book *Knead to Know*, published by Icon Books.

According to Cassell, aside from providing colour and flavour, saffron makes buns or cakes ‘wholesome and palatable’, aids digestion and will ‘drive out intestinal worms’ to boot, and suggests swapping the liquid used in your favourite bun or cake recipe for saffron-steeped hot water that has been allowed to cool to blood heat.[7]

Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world by weight, and there was (and still is) therefore pressure for food manufacturers to use an adulterant such as yellow food colouring or turmeric to offset costs. Real saffron buns are appropriately (but proportionally) more expensive than your regular fruit bun, and according to Elizabeth David, the strands are not strained from their soaking water as one might expect, ‘probably as a visible sign that true saffron has been used.’[8]

But how much saffron to use? Amounts can vary greatly, and Sam Bilton wrestles with this question: she spotted that Elizabeth David complained about people using too much saffron in their cooking – true, it can taste soapy when over-applied – but then asks for four pinches in her recipe for buns![9] Of course, the answer depends upon a few factors: the quality of your saffron, how long it has been sitting in the spice rack, and how much you enjoy the flavour of saffron. My recipe uses ‘a good 2-finger pinch’.

This is what ‘a good 2-finger pinch’ looks like

If you want to know more about the history of saffron in Britain, have a listen to this episode of The British Food History Podcast with guest Sam Bilton:

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 12 buns.

230 ml full-fat milk, plus extra for brushing.

A good 2-finger pinch of saffron

500 g strong white bread flour, plus extra for rolling

1 tsp/8 g instant yeast

1 tsp/10 g salt

¾ tsp mixed spice or 1½ tsp ground coriander seed

60 g caster sugar

2 eggs, beaten

120 g clotted cream

A little flavourless oil for proving

120 g mixed dried fruit (currants, raisins and sultanas)

Pour the milk into a small saucepan and bring to scalding point. Check to see if a skin has formed on the milk’s surface, if so, remove it before adding the saffron.[10] Whisk in the saffron strands and let the milk cool to ‘blood heat’ (about 40°C).

Mix the flour, yeast, salt, spice/s and sugar in the bowl of a tabletop mixer, make a well in the centre and add the eggs, clotted cream and saffron-infused milk. Attach a kneading hook, mix to combine on a slow speed and then turn up the speed a couple of notches and knead for around 6 minutes, until the mixture is smooth and elastic – it will still be a little sticky.

Add a little oil to a bowl and with oiled hands, gather up your dough into a ball and sit it in the bowl. Cover with cling film or a damp, clean tea towel until it doubles in size. Mine took 2 hours.

Knead the dried fruit into the dough, then divide into 12 (for precision weigh the dough), then line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

Roll each piece of dough into tight balls using a very small amount of flour to prevent it sticking and then arrange on the baking tray. Cover and allow to prove – this usually takes a third of the time as the first rising.[11]

Preheat the oven to 200°C and use the steam setting, or place a metal tray on the base of the oven and pour water into it.

Brush the buns with milk and place in the oven for 18 to 20 minutes. If they turn too golden brown, turn down the heat to 175°C.

When ready, remove from the oven and immediately brush with more milk and then throw a double layer of clean tea towels over them and allow to cool.

These are best eaten on the day they were made; any older than that, they should be toasted.

Notes:

[1] Davidson, A. (1999) The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press; Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999) The Taste of Britain. Devon: Harper Press. It also prompts the question – why are there no famous Essex saffron bakes or dishes? Maybe there is.

[2] Bilton, S. (2022) Fool’s Gold: A History of British Saffron. Prospect Books.

[3] Digby, K. (1669) The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened (1997 reprint). Edited by J. Stevenson and P. Davidson. Prospect Books.

[4] Cassell (1883) Cassell’s dictionary of cookery. Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.; Farley, J. (1783) The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant. Price.

[5] Mason & Brown (1999); Bilton (2022).

[6] Bilton (2022).

[7] Cassell (1883)

[8] David, E. (1977) English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Grub Street.

[9] Bilton (2022).

[10] I speak from personal experience here: if you don’t remove the skin, the strands just get caught encapsulated in it.

[11] The best things to use to cover a whole tray of buns are a large shopping “bag for life”, an upturned plastic storage box or a damp, clean tea towel: take your pick.

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Filed under baking, bread, cooking, food, General, history, Recipes, Teatime, Uncategorized

Tagged as baking, bread, buns, food, history, recipe, saffron, Teatime

14/06/2025 · 9:41 am

Dr Wall’s Dinner wins at the British Library Food Season Awards 2025

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 project, called Dr. Wall’s Dinner was developed with partners Worcestershire LitFest & Fringe and Heart of Worcester College. If you want to know more about the project, check out this short YouTube video.

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:

Scones: A Brief History

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]

For more about the history of bakestones and griddlecakes see my book Knead to Know: A History of Baking, published by Icon Books.

Wheaten bread may have been used in both types of scone, but more often they were made from oats or barley and sometimes peasemeal in 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 18^th 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!

Notes:

[1] This is discussed at length in my book The Philosophy of Puddings (2024).

[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.

[7] McNeill (1968)

[8] Cassell. (1883). Cassell’s dictionary of cookery. Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.; Wells, R. (1892). The Pastry Cook & Confectioners’ Guide. Crosby Lockwood and Son.

[9] White, F. (1932). Good Things in England. Persephone.

[10] Buttery, N. (2019, October 19). Cornish Splits (& More on Cream Teas). British Food: A History.

[11] Mason, L., & Brown, C. (1999). The Taste of Britain. Harper Press.

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Tagged as baking, food, griddlecakes, history, scone, Scotland, Teatime

25/05/2025 · 1:13 pm

‘Knead to Know: A History of Baking’ talk now on YouTube

Hello everyone. I do hope your Bank Holiday Weekend is going swimmingly and that you are enjoying the sunshine (& showers!).

I have uploaded my ‘Knead to Know’ Zoom talk from September last year to my YouTube channel. I know there were several people who couldn’t make it on the night. It’s completely unedited except for the Q&A section at the end.

I talked about how I approached writing Knead to Know: A History of Baking by asking myself, “What is baking?”, a trickier and more philosophical question than you might think; the origins and history of the very first bakers; Early Medieval bread and bakers; Yorkshire Christmas Pyes; and the Denby Dale Pie.

I’ll be adding more content to my channel throughout the year, so please give it a follow if you are a YouTube user: click here to view and follow the channel.

Knead to Know: A History of Baking is published by Icon Books and is available from all good bookshops.

Four Scone Recipes

You know what it’s like; you go to the home baking aisle of the supermarket and pick up a bag of flour, thinking ‘I’m sure I’m running low’, buy a bag, only to find there is, in fact, a large bag sitting, unopened, in the pantry. Unsure what to do with them, I asked social media whether I should make some scones, saffron buns or lardy cake with it (three recipes I have been meaning to post for years now). The answer came in: 3-way tie. I shall endeavour to do all three for you over the next month or so.

Up first, then, are scones, the must-have for a modern Cornish or Devonshire cream tea. I have written about cream teas both on the blog and in my book Knead to Know, the excerpt of which you can find on my YouTube Channel.

This is the recipe I used when I had both my restaurant and artisan market stall, so it is very tried-and-tested. I have provided some variations for you beneath the method: cranberry and orange, cheese, and walnut and Stilton. When the restaurant was open, we served a savoury cream tea using a cheese scone, swapped clotted cream for cream cheese and exchanged the jam for curried beetroot chutney or onion marmalade.

Classic recipes – especially Scottish and Irish ones – use buttermilk instead of plain milk. As buttermilk is increasingly difficult to get hold of these days, I’ve used milk, but you can swap the two. If you do, use 15 g bicarbonate of soda instead of 25 g baking powder. One final thing: I use strong white flour instead of plain to give the scones a boost in the oven, again, not traditional; in fact, it was a trick picked up from Paul Hollywood in his book 100 Great Breads. This doesn’t mean you can knead the dough roughly as though it is for bread; you still have to use a light touch with mixing, rolling and cutting out. Hopefully, my method will help you achieve great results.

I’ll follow soon with a post on the history of scones.

Basic Scones

A note on measuring liquids: 1 ml of milk weighs 1 g, so it’s easier – and much more accurate – to weigh it on scales rather than reading the graduations on the side of the measuring jug.

Makes 12 to 15 scones.

500 g strong white flour, plus extra for dusting

30g baking powder

½ tsp salt

75g butter

75g caster sugar

80g quartered glacé cherries, raisins or currants (optional)

200 ml/g whole milk

2 medium eggs

Egg wash: 1 egg or egg yolk beaten with ½ tsp salt

Granulated or Demerara sugar for sprinkling

Preheat your oven to 200°C.

In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt and rub in the butter – you can use the flat beater attachment on your mixer with this, or good old fingertips. Stir in the sugar and fruit (if using).

Beat the eggs with the milk, and steadily mix the liquids into the dry ingredients. If using a mixer, keep it at a slow speed. Make sure all the flour is incorporated, bring the dough together and give it a brief knead on a floured worktop until the dough is smooth.

Keeping your worktop floured, roll out the dough to a thickness of 1.5 to 1.75 cm (a generous ½ inch), and cut out into rounds. I normally use a cutter of a diameter between 7 and 8 cm. It is important to take care when cutting: make sure you dunk your cutter in more flour and tap off excess before cutting. This is important because if there are splodges of sticky dough on the cutter, it will seal the edges of the scones, preventing a good rise. Also, don’t be tempted to twist your cutter, as this will have a similar effect. Arrange the cut-out scones on 2 lined baking sheets.

Bring the leftover dough together with your hands to form a cohesive dough without kneading it too much – we don’t want tough scones! Roll out again and cut out. Repeat until all of the mixture is used up.

Brush with egg wash being careful not to let any dribble down the sides – again, this will hamper the rising of the dough – then sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown and well risen. If there is uneven browning at the 10-minute mark, switch the trays around in the oven.

Cool on a rack.

Scones are best enjoyed on the day or the day after they are made. They do freeze well. Enliven them by popping them in the microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.

Eat with butter or clotted cream and jam.

Variations

Cranberry and Orange

Make as above, but add the zest of two oranges to the dry ingredients, and use dried cranberries instead of raisins or currants. Juice the oranges, pour into a measuring jug and top up with milk to 200ml/g.

Classic cheese scones

Use just 25 g caster sugar, and add 100 to 125 g grated Cheddar cheese once the flour has been rubbed in. If you like, you can add ½ teaspoon of dried herbs and a good pinch of Cayenne pepper. Use 230 g/ml of milk instead of 200 g/ml. Sprinkle some finely grated cheese (Parmesan is good) over the egg-washed scones before they go in the oven.

Walnut and Stilton scones

As above, but use 100-125 g grated Stilton and 80 g chopped walnuts

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Tagged as baking, cream tea, food, recipe, scone, Teatime

22/03/2025 · 11:48 am

Yorkshire Teacakes

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.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1883)[1]

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.

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.

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.

Notes:

[1] Cassell (1883) Cassell’s dictionary of cookery. Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.

[2] Check out Elizabeth David’s classic English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) for several other examples.

[3] David, E. (1977) English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Grub Street; Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999) The Taste of Britain. Devon: Harper Press.

[4] Cassell (1883)

[5] White, F. (1932) Good Things in England. Persephone.

[6] Brears, P. (2014) Traditional Food in Yorkshire. Prospect Books.

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‘Knead to Know: A History of Baking’ talk now on YouTube

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