I mentioned yesterday Jack Warner’s fantastic cheese-and-biscuits recipe, included in The Curious Cookbook by Peter Ross. The original source is a wartime collection entitled A Kitchen Goes To War : Famous People Contribute 150 Recipes To A Ration-Time Cookery Book (1940). Among the other dishes is the splendidly-named Agatha Christie’s Mystery Potatoes. I was intending to transcribe the recipe here, then realised that in so doing I would shatter the mystery, so instead I will urge – or indeed egg you on – to buy the book.

Meanwhile, you might be interested in making imitation bacon out of marzipan. Who wouldn’t be?

Take some of your marchpane [marzipan] Paste, and work it in red saunders [sandalwood – a red dye] till it be red; then rowl a broad sheet of white paste, and a sheet of red paste; three of the white and four of the red, and so one upon the other in mingled sorts, every red between, then cut it overthwart, till it look like collops [slices] of bacon, then dry it.

That is from A Queen’s Delight of 1671, and given the title I suggest you make some to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

The Queen Of Crime, contemplating her mysterious potatoes