Toffee Apples complete our trinity of essential Bonfire Night foods. According to Dorothy Hartley in Food in England, toffee apples would have been (understandably) expensive before we started importing large quantities of plantation sugar. “Probably small windfall apples dipped in a toffee of honey and beeswax bedabbled the fairs of St. Batholomew even before sugar, as we…
There are certain foods I get a weird pleasure from making because they seem like things you buy rather than make. Foods that just seem to arrive in the world fully formed – that capitalism has just got so good at making for us you wouldn’t ever bother to create them yourself. Scotch eggs, sausages, ketchup, bonfire toffee….
Parkin, it turns out, is barely available beyond the borders of our magnificent county. (Well, Lancashire makes some scurrilous claims on it, but we’ll ignore them for now.) Here in Yorkshire, though, parkin is firmly associated with Bonfire Night for reasons that probably stem from Celtic paganism hidden deep in the bedrock of our culture. It’s…
Love-love-love this Crusty Cheese Bake. Although it’s not all that rustic, it really feels like it epitomises traditional Yorkshire food in a lot of ways to me. This dish takes affordable, homely carbs, smothers them in cheese and gives even the greenest cook the option to improvise with it however they like. Crusty Cheese Bake is, I suppose, Yorkshire’s…
Eight recipes in to Yorkshire Grub and I’ve used the word ‘simple’ approximately 1,082 times. But, honestly, these cheese muffins from Keighley are about as simple a bake as you could humanly expect to exist. These little pillows of joy (via Joan Poulson’s Old Yorkshire Recipes, 1974) take about 20 minutes from getting out your mixing bowl to slathering…
Yorkshire Grub’s first proper sweet dish! Maybe that seems like an oversight to you, but savoury’s always been my big love. Moggy is extremely delicious, though. And there are no cats in it. Recipes for Moggy show up in various older cookbooks. Joan Poulson writes in a couple of her books that the name is most likely…
There’s no getting away from it. There are leaves all over the ground and many of them are brown. It’s definitely autumn. And, while it’s getting dark at 6pm and there are millions of cubic metres of drizzle in the air, everybody feels better if we focus on the fact that you can wear a jumper and…
“It’s an American dish!” So said one of my girlfriend’s family members when she cooked this meatloaf for them a couple of weeks ago. I get where they’re coming from. I tend to think of it as a North American dish, too. It conjures images of American moms from 1960s sitcoms you never watched serving up…
Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and…
Hot Bacon Cake. The moment I read the name of this one in Mrs Appleby’s Traditional Yorkshire Recipes (1982) I knew it was getting made. The name sang out to me. And it is a cake, too. This isn’t some pressed potato and bacon concoction or any such thing. An actual cake. With bacon in it. It’s…
