Читать книгу The Taste of Britain - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - Страница 158

In the past, the British made many special foods for Easter, including various breads and biscuits and things like tansy puddings. In the twenty-first century, only hot cross buns and simnel cakes are well-known, but a few others survive. One is the Easter biscuit, known also as Easter cake, in South Western England. Old recipes show them to belong to the same type as Shrewsbury cakes (p. 176), based on a rich shortbread mixed with currants and flavoured with spices and peel. Harris and Borella (c. 1900) say there were many varieties, that they were rather large, cut with a fluted cutter and sugared on top. They give 2 recipes. Firstly, ‘the usual’, made with butter or margarine and flavoured with oil of lemon; and a ‘recommended’ one, for which butter and Vostizza currants are specified and lemon zest used to flavour. They comment on a method used by an old-fashioned pastry cook’s shop in London where the biscuit was pressed out with the thumbs to give an irregularly shaped biscuit with an uneven surface. The appearance was ugly, but the butter and flavouring of orange and lemon zest made them very good. These recipes are similar to 2 collected by Florence White in the 1930s. One, called a Sedgemoor Easter cake, came from Somerset. According to Bristol baker John Williams, Easter biscuits are still very popular in the city of Bristol and throughout much of the South West; he regards the flavouring of oil of cassia (a form of cinnamon) as the defining characteristic.