yum, yum.....pigs' cheeks

Apparently, some once-common British dishes are disappearing from our menus. Here are some of them; see if you can figure out why this should be:

Bath Chaps (nothing to do with pool lifeguards or cowboys' trousers) - this West Country dish consists of pickled pigs' cheeks soaked in water, boiled and rolled in breadcrumbs to be eaten cold, like ham.

Bedfordshire Clanger - originally for farmworkers, made from a roll of suet pastry filled with cheap cuts of meat at one end and fruit at the other. Sounds similar to a Cornish Pasty which these days just consists of meat & potato but for the now almost extinct Cornish tin-miners would also have a sweet filling at one end.

Jugged Hare - made from a sauce featuring port and hare's blood.

Squirrel Casserole - speaks for itself, really.




Brawn - no not this sort! - but a jellied pigs' head.



Calf's foot jelly - chop the feet off of baby cows, boil them up to extract the natural gelatin and there you have it - a once polular food for invalids.

Up in Scotland there was Crappit heids - boiled haddock heads stuffed with oatmeal, suet & onions.

And for the Welsh Griwel blawd ceirch - oatmeal mixed with gruel.

After all of these delicious and nutritious savoury dishes you could delight your palate with:

Junket a dish of sweetened milk with rennet, served with sugar & cream.

Sussex Pond Pudding - (looks very scrummy), a whole lemon in golden buttery sugar syrup encased in a suet crust. Mmmmmm.........

Kentish Pudding Pie - sweet rice pudding with a pastry top

Dorset dumplings - apples served with suet.

I'm off now to make my jam sandwich.