Cookery: Flour of Scotland: by Elizabeth Luard

In the light of the sad death of Elizabeth II, it’s appropriate to consider the frugality of royal eating habits at home. Menus for state banquets may be an opportunity for display (smoked salmon, roast lamb, summer pudding) but, for the generation who waved tiny Union flags from the sidewalks of the Mall at a distant, glittering figure in the Coronation coach, frugality at table was seen as both necessary and admirable. Breakfast and tea are (or were) the main events in palace and cottage alike, accounting for the national appetite for baking and a lingering distrust of fancy foreign food, unless of colonial origin. Here are three recipes of guaranteed royal provenance. Each is prepared with eggs fresh from foraging hens (fed on a daily boil-up of household scraps), all to be finished (or started) with butter and cream hand-milked from cows in wildflower meadows humming with bees. Balmoral...

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