Easy Ginger Toffee Apples for Bonfire Night

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…

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Bonfire Toffee (or Plot Toffee, if You’re Feeling Spooky)

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….

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Chili Parkin, a Warm Twist on a Yorkshire Classic

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…

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