I love old cookbooks, particularly ones that include very old fashioned or traditional recipes. Only last week I came across a beauty, published by Country Life in 1929.
Like modern cookery books it is well illustrated, but here the illustrations range from the informative.
To the useful.
To the advisory
And to the delightful.
There can be problems in understanding the recipes.
Flead (Fleer or Leaf) is the unrefined fat of a pig.
Not having any Flead available (I live in rural Dorset, not somewhere like London where I am sure an artesian butcher could easily supply hand flaked, sustainably sourced and biometrically tickled Flead). I had to try something else.
I was tempted by the Bakewell Tart, made without almonds, but settled on an easy Derby Cake.
The Derby Cakes do look very tasty…are they soft, like cakes, or crisp, like biscuits?
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They have a crisp outside but a softer inside, a bit like a softer, unspiced, Easter biscuit.
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we can produce organic flead and of course vegan flead made from a combination of chia seeds, xanthan gum and goji berry juice, as I’m sure you know
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Hmmm…you might need to butcher your own pig. Those biscuits look heavenly. I’ve found you can tell the age of a recipe by the proportion of flour to sugar–it’s often almost equal–or even more sugar than flour, whereas in a modern recipe, there is less sugar. Although your recipe doesn’t prove that rule…
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