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.

The British sausage is called a banger because in the First World War it was so full of water that it exploded in the pan, and the one that never did was the one from Cumberland. Before the war a butcher's sausage was pork, fat, salt, pepper and a little rusk to hold it, and it fried. During the war, with meat rationed, the makers filled the skins with water, scraps and whatever cereal they could get, and the water turned to steam in the hot fat and burst the casing. Soldiers named it, and the name stuck to the whole family for a hundred years. The Cumberland sausage stood apart. Up in the Lake District it was made by the yard, coiled flat into a wheel rather than twisted into links, from coarsely chopped pork rather than minced slurry, heavily peppered, with no colouring and almost no filler. A proper one is more than 90% meat. The spice came in through Whitehaven, which was trading with the Indies, and the pork came from the pigs every Cumbrian farmhouse kept. You bought it by length, not by number. If you grew up in the north it was the Sunday breakfast, a whole coil in the pan, cut into quarters at the table, with the fat spitting round it. Fried in lard, because that is what was in the pan. In 2011 the name was protected by law. It has to be made in Cumbria, in the coil, with at least 80% meat, and the cheap imitations with a quarter of the pig and three quarters of the water had to drop the name. The sausage in a supermarket pack is what the war taught the trade: fill the skin with water and sell the skin. The one in the coil is what a sausage was before anyone had to. They told you sausages were bad for you. They meant the water.