Swindon Piglets Recipe. On a recent visit to Local Studies in Swindon’s central library our board member Angela came across this pre-decimalisation copy of a McDougall’s recipe book – new versions of this classic book of baking are available on their website. Anyway, the reason for this little book being in the Local Studies treasure trove is the following recipe for Swindon Piglets.
If you fancy having a go at making Swindon piglets what follows is what you need and what you do.
Ingredients
Remember this recipe book is pre-decimalisation so you’ll have to convert the quantities into metric measurements. In that endeavour, Google is your friend.
- Buy a pack of flaky/puff pastry. There’s need to make our own unless you’re a masochist.
- ½ Ib skinless sausages – depending on the size of the sausages, this equates to four sausages.
- ½ Ib shoulder bacon
- ¼ Ib finely chopped mushrooms
- 3 medium sized tomatoes, peeled and chopped*
- 1 teaspoonful finely chopped parsley
- A little beaten egg
- Salt and pepper
*Top tip for peeling tomatoes: put them in a bowl of boiled water for a couple of minutes. The skins will split and are then easy to remove.
This is what you do
Mix tomatoes, mushrooms, parsley and seasoning together. Cut bacon into pieces long enough to wrap around the sausages. Spread each piece with the filling and wrap around the sausages.
Roll out the pastry into an oblong a little over a ¼ inch thick.
Trim the edges, cut into strips length-ways about 1 inch narrower than the prepared sausages.
Brush the pastry with water or beaten egg.
Place a sausage onto a strip of pastry and roll until the pastry strip overlaps by about half an inch.
With the sealed edges underneath, place the sausages on an ungreased baking tray and bake for 20 mins in the middle of the oven – 440 degrees Fahrenheit. Gas regulo mark 8. 225 Celsius approx.
The finished product
Right – I freely admit that I’m not the best of cooks and it’s either the recipe – or me (happy to go with the latter) but I didn’t need anything like the amount of bacon the recipe stated. And I also, as the image below shows, had a lot of tomato and mushroom left over…. So! Please can someone else have a go and do a better job than me?!
Flaky and Rough Puff Pasty
For the craic – and if you’ve really got nothing better to do – find below instructions for making flaky pasty and rough puff pastry.
