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Scrap Cakes
Take the scraps which remain after melting down a pound of leaf or flead. Put these into a bowl, slice them, and rub them into three-quarters of a pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt, four ounces of picked and dried currants, two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar, half an ounce of candied peel finely minced, and a little grated nutmeg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and moisten them with as much cold water as will make a light paste. Roll this out, stamp it into round cakes, and bake these in a quick oven. A spoonful of baking-powder may be added or not. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Cost, exclusive of the scraps, 6d.
A thrift baking recipe built on the crisp residue left in the pan after rendering pork fat. Everything hinges on having those scraps, and on handling the paste as little as possible.
- Leaf, flead and scrapsLeaf lard is the soft fat from around the pig's kidneys; "flead" is the same fat still in its membrane, a dialect term of Kent and the neighbouring southern counties. The "scraps" are the browned, crisp solids strained out after rendering — cracklings. A pound of leaf yields only a small quantity of them, so this was a by-product recipe, not a shopping list. Some butchers who render their own lard will sell scraps; otherwise render leaf lard yourself and save the residue.
- Chop the scraps smallSlice or chop the scraps finely before rubbing them into the flour. Large shards stay chewy and tear the paste when you roll it. They should be distributed like small pieces of cold fat in shortcrust.
- Quick ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "quick oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425–450°F. About twenty minutes at that heat should give a pale gold, short cake; lower and slower tends to make them tough and dry.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is an unrefined soft brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest match; granulated white will work but the cakes will taste flatter.
- MeasuresThree-quarters of a pound of flour is roughly 3 cups (340 g); four ounces of currants is about ¾ cup. The two spoonfuls of sugar are table-spoons, and the period spoon is close enough to a modern one.
- "Picked and dried" currantsPicking meant removing stalks and grit from loose dried fruit, and drying meant patting off any washing water. Packaged currants today need neither, but do warm them briefly if they are very hard.
- Water, and how muchAdd the water a spoonful at a time until the paste just holds together — the scraps carry their own fat, so it takes less than a plain pastry. Overworking develops gluten and the cakes go hard.
- Baking powder, optionalWithout it you get a short, biscuit-like cake; with a teaspoon you get something closer to a scone. Both are correct here.
- YieldExpect about a dozen to eighteen cakes stamped at 2½ inches. They keep two or three days in a tin and are best eaten the day they are baked, split and buttered.
Scrap cakes belong to the older economy of the domestic pig, in which nothing rendered down was thrown away: the clear fat became lard for pastry and frying, and the browned residue went into savoury or lightly sweetened cakes, dripping bread, and scrap-and-onion suppers. "Flead" is a dialect word for the leaf fat in its membrane, still associated with the flead cakes of Kent and the Weald, and a related thrift, though one working with rendered lard rather than scraps, produced the lardy cakes of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire and, in other countries, pork-crackling breads. The whole point was a currant cake got almost free from something already in the pan.