Traditional English cooking: nettle pudding and other ancient recipes

When you think of old-fashioned English cooking, it probably conjures up images of roast beef or steak and kidney pie. But nettle pudding makes those dishes look like young pretenders. The creation from 6,000BC was yesterday declared Britain's oldest recipe.It was a staple of Stone Age man, who made it by mixing nettles and other leaves such as dandelion and sorrel, with barley flour, salt and water. Almost as old are smoky stew, which was made of bacon and smoked fish, and meat pudding, a forerunner of haggis and sausages.Roast hedgehog was also a firm favourite some 8,000 years ago, the UKTV series The People's Cookbook will reveal.Served with a wild duck or cinnamon sauce, hedgehog was the provenance of the rich, with its thorny nature meaning it would have been avoided by all but the most adventurous cooks.Barley bread was popular from around 5,000BC, while pottage, or meat and vegetable stew, became part of the Ancient Briton's diet 3,000 years later.scroll down for more With the...