Cooking In European cooking, a mixture of butter and flour called a roux is used to thicken liquids to make stews or sauces. In Asian cooking, a similar effect is obtained from a mixture of rice or corn starch and water. These techniques rely on the properties of starches to create simpler mucilaginous saccharides during cooking, which causes the familiar thickening of sauces. This thickening will break down, however, under additional heat. Types of fat include vegetable oils, animal products such as butter and lard, as well as fats from grains, including corn and flax oils. Fats are used in a
Fat rascal ashes of a peat fire, and the terms "fat rascal" and "turf cake" are sometimes used interchangeably. A Yorkshire cookery book of 1973 had plain flour, baking powder, butter and currants as the ingredients. A 1980 Yorkshire cookbook described fat rascals as a means of using leftover pastry, typically consisting of scraps of shortcrust pastry, sugared, sprinkled with currants and rolled into thick flat cakes before baking. Fat rascals, whatever their composition, do not appear to have been widely known outside the Yorkshire region until the 1980s, although there are occasional mentions in other regions, such as in Rye, Sussex