Welcome to Yorkshire Grub, Home of Yorkshire Food!

Welcome to Yorkshire Grub! I’ve been working on this project for a little while and it’s great to have something to show you all.

Yorkshire Grub is, if I encounter you in an elevator, ‘a growing collection of traditional Yorkshire recipes for the 21st century.’

Over the years traditional English food has fallen to the wayside, knocked to the curb in favour of a wide variety of styles and influences coming from every corner of the globe except, most of the time, our own. While the richness and variety of food on offer in Britain today means that it’s probably better than it’s ever been, there’s a wealth of homegrown cuisine and food stories that are getting overlooked. And worse, may be in danger of getting lost. In the spirit of preserving that knowledge and making it relevant to the modern cook (and eater!) Yorkshire Grub is dedicated to bringing traditional food from the best county in Britain to the 21st century.

The aim of the site is to take the food your grandma used to eat and make it accessible to the modern cook. In some cases that will simply mean touching recipes up with modern measurements and saying ‘here you go’, while in others it might mean giving a little more explanation and instruction than the recipe writers of yesterday were inclined to offer. I’ll take some of the dishes a step further by adapting them to use up-to-date ingredients and cooking techniques, while others will get a more creative and modern interpretation to better suit 21st century tastes.

Some of the recipes you’ll find here have their roots squarely in Yorkshire. Others are a little more difficult to pin down, but are certainly a part of the Yorkshire tradition even if they can’t definitively be claimed to have originated here. All of them are delicious and simple. A lot of them are a bit mucky!

The bulk of the recipes here will, I hope, be pretty straightforward in terms of sourcing ingredients and the cooking process itself. The idea is provide useful recipes for home cooks, not create a museum of yesterday’s food. That doesn’t mean, though, that there won’t be a few arcane dishes thrown in for curiosity’s sake. Part of the purpose of this site is to capture knowledge and food stories before they slip away and yes, I most certainly do want to brew some beer the way medieval monks used to do it using an herb called bog myrtle.

I’ll warn you now – I’m a food lover, a writer and a half-decent cook. I’m not an expert, nor am I an historian. I’m taking a deep dive into old cookbooks and hopefully, at some point, the brains of a few pensioners, food producers, cooks and chefs and this site will be one of the results of that dive. If you care to come along with me, that would be brilliant. If you care to get in touch with your own recipes and stories, even better!

I’ll be posting on Mondays and Thursdays, but the first two posts are this awesome Knaresborough Picnic Pie and a mostly-traditional tomato chutney that complements it superbly.

Please do get in touch! Give me a shout on Instagram, Facebook and twitter (Yorkshire Grub is here and my personal account is here).

Speak to you soon!

Mark

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