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Lardy cake, also known as lardy bread, lardy Johns, dough cake, dripper, and fourses cake, is a traditional spiced bread enriched with lard and found in several southern counties of England, including Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Gloucestershire, each claiming to be the original source. It remains a popular weekend tea cake.
Lardy cake is said to originate on "the borders of the chalk-line in England running from Wiltshire through Oxfordshire to Cambridgeshire".
In the days when ovens were fired only once a week, and in some households only once a fortnight, for the baking of a very large batch of bread and dough products, any dough not used for making the daily bread was transformed into richer products such as lardy cakes, which thus earned the alternative name 'scrap cakes'. They might also be called 'flead cakes'—flead is a light kind of lard scraped off a pig's internal membranes. The high fat content in such cakes would prevent them from drying out as quickly as ordinary bread. As reported by the author Elizabeth David, a Hampshire cookbook advises that the cake be turned upside down after baking "so the lard can soak through." It is theoretically possible to substitute butter for lard, but as David puts it: "How could they be Lardy cakes without lard?"
A variation of the lardy cake is the dripping cake. In Hampshire, a form of the cake was made without currants Lardy Cake Recipe - Recipes by Tallyrand which is said to relate the Hampshire lardy cake to Surrey lardy rolls and Guildford manchets.
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