Lardy cakes

Lardy cake isn’t lardy cake if you hold back."

Kimberley Killebrew/Daring Gourmet

The lardy cake above is my inspiration today - it's Tom Hunt's version of this traditional British cake from The Guardian - and now having searched the net for variants - one of the best I think. It came from a link in Felicity Cloake's Guardian Feast newsletter, in which she was bemoaning the loss, or at least scarcity of traditional British bakery treats such as this. Potentially unhealthy, but delicious and reviving.

In his introduction to his recipe Tom Hunt says:

"Lardy cake is not for the faint-hearted: it’s rich, indulgent and unapologetically full of fat, making it a great filler after some really hard graft. It’s a hugely nostalgic British pastry that turns the humblest of ingredients into the ultimate, satiating treat."

So what is it? Well it's a kind of fruit bread I suppose, but the crucial difference from the normal kind of fruit bread, is that the fat used is lard and that the dough is folded and rolled, folded and rolled - a bit like puff pastry although not to quite the same degree, which results in the richly fatty layers you can see above.

It actually goes by a number of different names - Wikipedia gives us some - lardy bread, lardy Johns, dough cake, dripper, and fourses cake. But there is at least harvest cake as well, and various versions have a place name attached. Various explanations for these are: fourses - eaten as a snack at work at four in the afternoon - an afternoon version of elevensies; harvest - because it was a treat consumed at harvest time, and dripper - because of the amount of lard that probably dripped from it as you ate - certainly whilst it was cooking.

Which brings me to the lard. One of the reasons the various readers gave for its disappearance was because of the lard - cholesterol and all that - but apparently it has less saturated fat content than butter. Not only is there lard, but there should be a lot of lard - first rubbed into the flour to make the dough, and then spread over each layer of the dough as it is rolled out. Moreover when it is cooked you should turn it over to let the lard drip through the layers, and leave a crusty, caramelised layer on what will become the top.

Another thing to note about this is that various of the writers of recipes emphasised that it just had to be lard - including Elizabeth David who said:

"How could they be Lardy cakes without lard?"

This is an adapted version of one of her recipes - she has several in her British Bread and Yeast Cookery book - as made by the British Food and Travel website. Note the layers.

And still on the lard - it also has to be pure pork lard. So make your own says Kimberley Killebrew of the Daring Gourmet website, whose Traditional lardy cake this is, saying:

"if you have to ask how much fat or how many carbs and calories it has, just don’t even bother making it. And in that same vein, if you’re trying to make a “skinny” version of lardy cake, just make something else."

All of which goes to show that the British can be just as nationalistic about authenticity as anyone else.

It is easy to make lard by the way, just strain off the fat from your pork roast - that's it. The Daring Gourmet lady has a link to her recipe in the Lardy cake recipe.

Jane Grigson - another fan of traditional British food, says of it:

“The more lard, sugar and fruit you can cram in, the better, so that the dough is layered with brown sweet richness. Next time you may like to add more, or you may not. It probably will depend on how much Wiltshire mud runs through your veins.”

She had a recipe in her book English Food, and Neil Buttery on his Neil Cooks Grigson had a go at her Wiltshire Lardy Cake

"difficult to score this one; we tried it warm and it’s either 9/10 or 2/10. It tastes really sweet and is beautifully sticky with lovely plump juicy raisins, but has the bizarre savoury meatiness of the lard. I think if I were to cook it again, it would have to be even more skinny than Griggers’ measurements. However, once it was cool, it did taste less, er, meaty. Give it a go – easy and cheap to make, so I think I’ll go with a final score of 7/10."

So not everyone is a complete fan. And I have to say his end result doesn't look that tempting. But the name Wiltshire lardy cake, reminds me to speak briefly of origins. Although some northerners lay claim to it, it seems that it is really a southern dish. I think somebody say it came from along the chalk line across central southern England - Wiltshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire - but nobody really knows and some say the west country.

And historically, says Elizabeth David:

"It was only when sugar became cheap, and when the English taste for sweet things—particularly in the Midlands and the North—became more pronounced, that such rich breads or cakes were made or could be bought from the bakery every week."

Apparently you have to search high and low these days to find it in shops in England. I guess it's all that scare about lard.

So here are a few examples that I found: Wiltshire lardy cake - Luke Nguyen - of all people/SBS; Lardy Cake - Gary Rhodes/ckbk; Lardy Cake - Hobbs House Bakery; Lardy Cake - Mary-Anne Boermans/Happy Foodie; and Lardy Cake - Victoria Glass/Great British Chefs

Some of them added a bit of butter - some were purists, and Mary-Anne Boermans achieved her layers by cutting and stacking rather than rolling and folding. Some of them were keen to turn them over at the end and let the lard soak through, and they varied on how much fruit they used as you can see. What fruit you use is less prescriptive than the whole lard thing.

I was actually surprised at how many 'traditional' British chefs - Delia, Jamie, The Hairy Bikers, had no recipe, so I'm concluding with Paul Hollywood of the Great British Bakeoff claim and considered one of the best British bakers - whose version looks pretty anaemic to me, and only uses a small amount of lard, with butter as well, and Gourmet Traveller, who admits to a variation with its Cherry Lardy Cake - not that there are many cherries in it by the look of this photo.

I doubt any of you are going to have a go - I probably am not - but it is a little sad that the British don't seem to be able to buy such traditional treats other than in out of the way places in the countryside. I guess it's also a little bit sad that we don't make them at home any more either. I'm not sure whether we had this at either my own or my grandmother's home, although I do remember something vaguely similar. And we certainly had lard.

By the way although you can buy lard in the supermarket the Daring Gourmet lady said that it contained other stuff and was not 'pure' so check the label - if you care.

YEARS GONE BY

June 12

2025 - Nothing

2024 - Nothing

2023 - First

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Vegetarian goes mainstream

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Holiday