Scrap Cakes
INGREDIENTS for 4 dozen cakes.-2 lbs. of leaf, or the inside fat of a pig; 1½ lb. of flour, lb. of moist sugar, 1/2 lb. of currants, 1 oz. of candied lemon-peel, ground allspice to taste. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Cut the leaf, or flead, as it is sometimes called, into small pieces; put it into a large dish, which place in a quick oven; be careful that it does not burn, and in a short time it will be reduced to oil, with the small pieces of leaf floating on the surface; and it is of these that the cakes should be made. Gather all the scraps together, put them into a basin with the flour, and rub them well together. Add the currants, sugar, candied peel, cut into thin slices, and the ground allspice. When all these ingredients are well mixed, moisten with sufficient cold water to make the whole into a nice paste; roll it out thin, cut it into shapes, and bake the cakes in a quick oven from 15 to 20 minutes. These are very economical and wholesome cakes for children, and the lard, melted at home, produced from the flead, is generally better than that you purchase. To prevent the lard from burning, and to insure its being a good colour, it is better to melt it in a jar placed in a saucepan of boiling water; by doing it in this manner, there will be no chance of its discolouring.
TIME.-15 to 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
A frugal Victorian biscuit built from the cracklings left after rendering leaf lard at home. It only makes sense if you are already rendering fat; the scraps are the point.
- Ignore the stray headingThe entry opens with the word SEA-KALE, a stray heading that does not belong to this recipe (an artefact of the text as transcribed). Nothing in the ingredients or method involves sea-kale.
- A missing quantityThe line reads "lb. of moist sugar" with the fraction dropped out in the type. For 1½ lb of flour, somewhere between 6 and 8 oz is the sensible range, but the original figure is genuinely lost rather than something to be reconstructed with confidence.
- Leaf, flead, flareAll three names mean the same thing: the sheet of hard fat around a pig's kidneys, sold today as leaf lard or flare fat. Ask a butcher; it is not a supermarket item. Two pounds renders down to roughly a pint and a half of very white lard plus a modest handful of scraps.
- Render it gently, not in a quick ovenBeeton contradicts herself in the same paragraph, and her second thought is the right one: set the fat in a jar or bowl standing in simmering water, or use a heavy pan over the lowest heat. Fat rendered hard and fast browns, smokes, and can catch; slow rendering gives white lard and pale scraps.
- The scraps are the shorteningOnce the fat has run out, what floats is crackling — crisp scraps of connective tissue. Drain it well, press out surplus fat, and chop it small before rubbing it into the flour. Wet, greasy scraps will make the paste slack and the cakes heavy.
- Moist sugar and currantsMoist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar. Currants are dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants.
- OvenA quick oven is roughly 400–450F (200–230C). Roll the paste thin, no more than about ¼ inch, and 15 to 20 minutes will colour them; thicker cakes will still be pale and doughy at that time.
- Yield and keepingFour dozen small cakes, so cut them around 2 inches across. They are dry and biscuit-like, and keep well in a tin for a week or more.
- SeasonSeptember to March is pig-killing season, when leaf fat was available. The recipe has no other seasonal constraint.
Scrap cakes belong to the pig-killing calendar of the rural English household, when a family that kept a pig rendered its own lard in autumn and winter and found a use for everything that came out of the pot. The scraps — cracklings, greaves, or scratchings, depending on the county — were eaten as they were, stirred into bread dough, or as here rubbed into a sweetened flour paste with currants and allspice. Mrs Beeton's framing is characteristic of the book: the recipe is offered as "very economical and wholesome cakes for children," and the real lesson tucked into the method is that home-rendered lard is better and whiter than the shop-bought article, a claim that mattered in a period when commercial lard was frequently adulterated. The technique of setting the fat in a jar within a pan of boiling water is simply a bain-marie, and it is the reason her lard stayed pale while a careless cook's went brown.