Cyril Smith and Rochdale

In 1962, when Cambridge House in Rochdale was opened to give young men a clean safe place to stay, Cyril Smith was 34, already an important man in the local community, and he seems to have regarded it as his private pleasure centre. The hostel ran from 1962 to 1965, Cyril Smith had keys and could come and go at any time, and was responsible for bringing in several boys to live there who’d been in difficult home situations, often then to work for the local authority, so that Smith would have control both over their jobs and over their home.

Scotland’s Food Programme

What does everyone know about Scottish food?

It’s the haggis. And the whisky. And the deep fried Mars bars.

Scots eat unhealthy food, get drunk, and our iconic national dish is made of the bits of the sheep that you’d have needed to be drunk and hungry to think worth eating.

Things That Look Like Other Things

This blogpost is dedicated to The Cake Girl, just because.

The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival falls on 30th September this year: Pat’s Chung Ying on Leith Walk is selling gorgeous boxes of mooncakes. (I didn’t check to see if they also sell the ingredients, but if they do, here’s how to make your own.) There are multiple variations on the basic mooncake, the general theme being a cake to be divided and shared among family while viewing the full moon of autumn. But look: this is an actual thing. Mooncakes that look like mobile phones (via):

Pizza

What is pizza?

You will find plenty of learned disagreement on this topic. Including what kind of cheese to use, what sort of sauce, what other toppings, and even the etymology of the word pizza. Naples may be the geographical source of pizza, but it was a peasant dish before it was a city food: and the pizza that we’re mostly used to eating is as much – or more – American as Italian.

The best pizza you can buy in Edinburgh is sold at Mamma’s in the Grassmarket.

But if you make your own bread, which I do, what is pizza becomes a much simpler question: