Andrew Davis

A steak and kidney pudding is a pound of beef and half a pound of ox kidney sealed inside a crust made of the fat from around the kidney, steamed in a basin under a cloth for five hours, and when the cloth comes off and the knife goes in, the gravy that has made itself inside runs out across the plate and the whole table leans in. The crust is suet: the hard white fat that sits round a beef kidney, grated into flour with cold water and nothing else, and it is the fat doing the work. In the steam it does not crisp like a pie lid. It goes soft, dense and slippery, soaked with gravy on the inside and like a dumpling on the out, and a wedge of it on the fork with the meat is the dish. Inside, the shin was cut into cubes and tossed in seasoned flour, the kidney into pieces the size of a thumbnail, both raw, packed in with an onion and a splash of water, and the lid pinched over. No stock, no wine, no granules. Five hours of the cheapest, hardest-working cut on the animal cooking in its own blood and juice with the kidney giving it depth, until it cuts with a spoon. Mrs Beeton printed it in 1861 and put oysters in with the kidney, because oysters were a penny a dozen and a poor man's meat. The French called the English Les Rosbifs, and the English called it John Bull's pudding. Every pub and chop house in the country had the basins in the copper at eleven, lifted out with a hook, turned onto the plate with a wobble, and the first cut sending the steam to the ceiling. In the mill towns it was Saturday dinner. On the Clyde it was Kate and Sidney. Soldiers in two wars wrote home asking for it. Every part of it is the animal: the fat in the crust, the shin, the kidney, the gravy made from nothing but themselves. The vegetables arrived in a separate dish and nobody fought over them. The one in the plastic tub, microwaved for four minutes, is lean diced beef, vegetable suet and a starch sauce, and it tastes of the tub. The real one still exists in a few pubs, with the cloth, and when it comes to the table men of seventy go quiet.

Clotted cream is the richest dairy product in the British kitchen, nearly two thirds fat, and it was invented as a way of keeping milk in a county with no ice. The method is older than anyone can trace. Fresh milk from the morning is left in a wide pan until the cream rises, then the whole pan is set over a very low fire or in a cooling bread oven for hours, never boiling, until a thick crust forms on top the colour of old gold. It cools overnight and the crust is lifted off with a skimmer. That crust is the cream, and the scalding is what kept it. Heated that way it lasted for days when fresh cream would have turned by teatime. Devon and Cornwall argued over it for centuries and still do. The Cornish got the legal protection in 1998, on condition that the milk is Cornish and the fat is at least fifty-five per cent, though the good stuff runs higher. The argument about whether the cream or the jam goes on the scone first has split the two counties for as long as there have been scones, and it is the only question in British food that people will genuinely fight over. If you grew up in the West Country it came in a cardboard tub with a crust you broke through with a knife, and it went on everything: the scone, the apple pie, the porridge, a spoon of it straight off the blade when nobody was looking. A pot sent by post to a relative in London was the standard Christmas present from Cornwall for a hundred years. It is milk with the water taken out and the fat left in, and it was the ordinary household food of the two poorest counties in England. The cream tea is now a treat you drive to and photograph. In 1930 it was what a dairy farmer's wife did with Tuesday's milk, and the fat was the whole point of doing it.

Shepherd's pie began as the Sunday joint being passed through a mincer on Monday, and the reason the potato lid was crisp is that it was spread with the dripping from the same roast. The mincer was cast iron, clamped to the edge of the kitchen table with a screw, and the cold remains of Sunday's leg of lamb or mutton went through it with the fat and the gristle, because the fat was what made Monday's dinner taste of Sunday's. The mince went into a dish with an onion, the gravy from the roasting tin that had set overnight into jelly, and a shake of Worcester sauce, and the mashed potato went over the top in a thick lid, forked into ridges, dotted with dripping, and baked until the ridges browned. The first printed version was 1791, as cottage pie, and the word shepherd's arrived later for the mutton version, which is the proper one. Beef makes a cottage pie. A shepherd minds sheep. It was dinner on Monday in every house that had roasted on Sunday, which was every house that could. The joint fed the family on Sunday, the pie on Monday, and the bone made the soup on Tuesday, and a leg of mutton was three dinners from one animal with nothing bought in but a few potatoes and an onion. A good one cuts clean, with the mince dark and wet underneath and the potato forming a crust that peels back from the dish, and the first forkful has the lid and the meat together. Peas, if there were peas. The one in the supermarket chiller is made with lean minced lamb that has never seen a roasting tin, a sauce thickened with starch, and a potato topping made with semi-skimmed milk and a spread, which is why it comes out of the oven the same colour it went in. The dripping was what made it Sunday twice.