Lardy Cake

This is a September cake. It belongs to the end of the harvest, when the fields are stubbled and the evenings start pulling in early, and someone in a Wiltshire kitchen would have rendered down a bit of lard from the pig and turned it, with sugar and currants and yesterday's bread dough, into something worth a celebration. Nobody much makes lardy cake any more. That seems a shame.

I'll be honest. It's not a fashionable thing. Lard has been out of favour for years, and the word itself does it no favours. But a good lardy cake is one of the more quietly splendid things this country has produced: bread dough laminated like rough puff pastry, with cold lard and brown sugar and spiced fruit folded through it in three goes, then baked until the underside turns dark and sticky and the top crisps into something between a bread crust and a toffee. When you turn it out of the tin, the bottom becomes the top, and that's where the glory is.

Get good lard if you can. A proper butcher will sell you the real thing, white and clean and faintly milky, nothing like the industrial blocks that gave it a bad name. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, so use what you can find, but the better the lard, the better the cake. Same with the fruit. Plump currants, decent peel, a grating of fresh nutmeg.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made one: lardy cake, late August, raining, kitchen smelled like a fairground. I've made it every harvest since.