English as it is eaten

Mr Kipling has nothing to do with a Bakewell Pudding

WE had visitors recently from foreign parts (well, Norfolk) and they were stopping off in Bakewell first. Bring us a Bakewell Pudding and we’ll have it for tea, we said.

“What’s a Bakewell Pudding?” was the answer.

Now I thought people the length and breadth of Britain had heard of this delicacy. They may not have known exactly how it was made – an egg and almond mixture spread with raspberry jam in a puff pastry case – but they would have recognised it when they saw it. Oddly, they had heard of a Bakewell Tart with which it is very often confused but is a different article. They have Mr Kipling to thank for that. Anyway, they bought a pudding and thought it was lovely so we shall know what to get them for Christmas.

This got me thinking about the regionality of British food, lovingly listed for all to see in the book Traditional Foods of Britain reviewed here. Even though I live just up the road I don’t buy the story that the pudding was invented in the town but it has made it its own.

When our visitors arrived an eyebrow went up quizzically when a visit to the bakers involved a discussion of how many breadcakes we should buy for lunch. Breadcakes? They were, I explained, the local word for a flat roll (or a barm cake, stottie, cob, bap or batch, depending on which part of the country you’re in).

Or a scuffler. For more about that you need to read this.

So now I was on a roll, so to speak. Had our guests ever had a Derbyshire oatcake, I wondered? They looked blank so I marched the husband down to the shop, announced he had never eaten one (gasps of amused shock and horror) and served them up for Sunday breakfast. “It’s like a pancake,” he observed. But made with oats, I explained. So healthy, then? Not if fried, said my wife. He liked them.

Normally I make them myself. But if you happen to be a long way from an oatcake (not the hard Scots variety eaten with cheese) here’s how to make them.

I said he could take the remaining oatcake home but we forgot so I had it for breakfast myself, griddled and spread with butter and jam. There’s more than one way to eat an oatcake. Now that ought to be a local saying, shouldn’t it?

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