Our street is making a habit of the Big Lunch - an Eden Project inspired event that gets street parties happening across the UK at lunchtime one Sunday a year. Bellenden Road is great for it - there's food from all over the world (go Peckham!) and particularly, it stars amazing carved watermelons.
I'm going to add to the variety with food from the past. I have been wanting to make Bachelor's Buttons for a while now. The recipe doesn't sound particularly exciting, but their name does.
It's a lost joke from 1911. Not a raucous laugh-out-loud joke but a shared between-friends nudge. Why, I wonder, rubbing in butter (3oz) to flour and sugar (6oz, 3oz) do they have that name? Are they for feeding to bachelors seductively, or winking at them over with a cup of tea? Are they the sort of dry, dull fare bachelors make for themselves? I stir in baking powder (1/2 tsp) and an egg, and start to make 'walnut sized pieces' and roll them in sugar. They are particularly large buttons: was there a fashion amongst bachelors to ornament their jackets with outsize closing devices?
Got it. As I pop then in the oven (what is a 'moderate oven?' Oven precision has come on - I go for 180 degrees) the buttons in rows look lost. That, I am sure, is why they are Bachelor's Buttons - nobody to sew them on.
Though the enormous button theory is getting more entertaining - when I pull them out of the oven 20 minutes later they are a couple of inches across. And the sugar makes them good and sparkly. Could it be that the bachelors of 1911 were, just a bit, bling?
(Recipe credit: Unrivalled Cookery for the Middle Classes (1911) by Miss Tuxford. They're excellent, by the way - somewhere between shortbread and macaroon)
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