Endangered British dishes - and the home cooks reviving them

Others include jugged hare and flummery - an oat-based fermented jelly, associated with farmhouse production and poverty.

Some endangered dishes aren't quite so obscure, however.

Buttery says there are some we probably recognise the names of but probably couldn't describe in detail and wouldn't really cook any more - like spotted dick.

While some of these dishes can be found on the menus of high-end restaurants focusing on British cooking, he argues the bar in deciding whether they are endangered or not often lies in whether people still regularly make them at home.

Herring worries some of these rarer dishes may soon disappear altogether.

"It's important we know that these recipes exist before they entirely disappear," she says. "They provide a snapshot of a different time".

But not everyone feels all dishes need to be revered to the same degree.

Chef and restaurant owner Anna Tobias is a champion of old-school British desserts, which often feature on her restaurant Café Deco's menu. While she says they are often best-sellers, she feels that there are some recipes that deserve to be relegated to history.

"Ultimately, the recipe has to be good – there are some really awful ones," she says, referencing strange combinations she has seen in cookbooks, including banana and herring and lamb and crab.

"Classic dishes are classic for a reason," she continues, "because they're good.

"Because they've been tried and tested - and accepted."

One business cashing in on a classic regional dish is La Rondine bakery in Bedford.

It sells a former school-dinner staple known as chocolate toothpaste. A sweet tart filled with a chocolate paste made with cocoa and milk powders.

Carlo Garganese, who runs the bakery alongside his father, Salvatori, says he believes the tarts are so popular - with the bakery selling 1,000 a week - because anyone who went to school in Bedford will fondly remember eating them at lunchtime.

"I think that's carried over into their adulthood," he says.

Memories do fade, however.

One business that sells steamed savoury suet puddings, an old-school British classic, worries memories of days gone by may not be enough to keep their puddings going in the long term.

Matthew Botley, head of operations at Kentish Mayde, says he can see a time when the puddings will "get forgotten as a British food".

While the puddings are popular among an older demographic, younger people don't tend to buy them, he says.

"I think we've got a few years of it yet, but I can see a time when the people who are eating them are no longer around."

While nostalgia is "massively" important in preserving endangered dishes, Buttery says, "you've got to pass it down, so that the next generation below you, or even the next one down from there, can also feel nostalgic about it in 50 years time.

"Otherwise it will disappear."

Photographs copyright of Annie Mae Herring and Shannon McCarthy