(Wor Language)

The Kitchen and the Story of Cooking in the North-East

STOTTY `N' SPICE CAKE: THE STORY OF NORTH EAST COOKING

This survey of cooking, kitchen and diet, past and present, is now available from Northumbria University Press (see main page for order details). It contains sections on 'The Open Fire', 'The Yuven', a list of associated Dialect Terms in subject groups, and a selection of Dialect Poetry and Prose - sure to inform and entertain.

Click here for examples of kitchen gear!

RECIPES & COMMENTS RECEIVED

sample recipes will be included in our forthcoming book; some extra material is collected here

Boilee
milk and bread and sugar. (South Moor/Stanley meet, Jun 2003)
"Stale bread soaked with hot milk and lashed with sugar" (Sunderland)
"Boilee - that to me is a slice of white bread put in a basin, sprinkled with sugar and then some warmed milk poured over. It was spoon fed to babies as their first solids, weaning them." (F.M., Ashington)

Bramble Jelly
"Pick blackberries on a dry day - only those not overripe. Wash them carefully. Cook the brambles with a just a little water - about 5 minutes will do. Allow to cool and strain through muslin 12 hours or overnight. For each pint (500 ml) of juice add 12 oz (350 gr) granulated sugar. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring all the time. Boil briskly for about 5 minutes until a drop sets on a cold plate. Pour into clean, sterilized, hot jars and cover." (Heddon on the Wall)

Bread-making
"Thursday was my mother's baking day. When I was ten years old my mother would bring out this huge earthenware dish and put in on the floor, tip into it half stone (7 lbs) flour, fresh yeast that had been rising in a basin; then I had to get on my knees while she poured in the yeast mix and enough warm water to make the bread dough. I had to kneel there and knead the dough until I thought my arms would drop off, while she was making fruit pies, scones, rice cakes, gingerbread, etc" (F.M., Ashington)

Bullets
hard boiled sweets: "Gis a bullet - give me a sweet" (Helen Hemingway, North Shields)

Corned Beef Square
Line a square or rectangular tin with pastry, cover with a mix of mashed corned beef, cooked potato and optionally some leek and/or tomato. Cover with top layer of pastry and seal. Brush with egg and bake. When cooked, let cool, cut into squares and serve as part of a buffet.

Crowdy
"We only used the word 'crowdy' for hen food, which was grain/oats/kitchen scraps/boiled tatie pealings, mixed into a paste with hot water."
(Brian Joslin re Bishop Auckland 1940s)

Date Cake
Paste made of fine oatmeal, butter and sugar - lay half in baking tin, add a layer of dates, top with rest of paste. Bake. (Morpeth)

Duck (Savoury Duck)
Offal concoctions. First cousin to West Midlands faggots, Lincolnshire hazlet and Scotch haggis. Sold on 'pay night' by pork butchers, hot, with pease pudding.
(James Blenkin, Shildon)

Durham
As Aw was gannin to Durham
Aw met wi' three jolly brisk women
Aw asked 'what news at Durham?'
They said – 'Joyful news in coming.'

“There's three sheeps' heads i' the pot
A peck o peasemeal in the pudding,'
They jumped, laffed, and skipped at that
For the joyful days are coming.

Food
by Meg Stephenson, North Shields

We were butchers by trade, so meat was god!
To me father-in-law his god was fish!
Whichever way the food was cooked
It torned into a geet gud dish.

'Cos both tha wives knew what ter dee
Ter make the most of what they had.
Butchers often had the joint
That customers thowt ower bad.

The vinegar was near at hand
To wash the meat that smelled too high!
Once cooked the family golluped it up,
"Any mair muther?" was the cry!

When it came to scones I've got to say
Me ma-in-law would take the prize
Folk munched her gordles be the score
None ever berra in thor eyes.

Young folk divvent cook nee mair
They really canne be fashed with that
Th' gerra pack of summick from the 'store'
'N' fling it at the bairns in two mins flat!

Gingerbread or Chocolate Cake
Melt 4 oz marge, 3.5 oz sugar, 2 tablespoons syrup in a pan; meanwhile warm a mug of milk in the oven (or microwave). In a basin put 3oz plain flour mixed with 1 teaspoon ground ginger or 2 teaspoons cocoa. Make a well in the centre and drip in 1 egg and melted marge/sugar. Stir well. Add half the warm milk and stir in. Add a teaspoon bicarbonate of soda to the remaining milk, add to the main mix and stir in quickly. Pour the batter into a square tin, moderate oven, 35 minutes.
(Meg Stephenson, North Shields. This is a WW2 recipe - economical on eggs!)

Iron Ore Boat
"This was the name my husband gave to a stodgy bread pudding. It was stale bread crumbled, fruit such as currants, sugar and milk. Baked in a meat tin and cut into squares. Served either cold or with custard." (Sunderland)

Oaty Bixits
6 oz fine oatmeal; 2 oz wheat flour; 1/2 oz sugar; 2 oz butter; 1 teaspoon fresh crushed black pepper; 1 teaspoon salt; 1/2 teaspoon sodium bicarbonate.
Mix dry ingredients, rub in butter, add a little water to bind. Rest it. Roll out thin, cut rounds, bake on tray, medium oven.

Octopus
Cook in pressure steamer for 35 minutes. Serve with salt and pepper, and (to give a meaty flavour) some walnut oil.

Panackelty
Made in frying pan with corned beef, onions, carrots, thickly sliced potatoes and gravy.
(Suzy Varty, Gateshead)

Peel as Firelighters
"My grandmother always put any orange or lemon peel in the warming part of the oven on her range - this dried out and made wonderful fire lighters when laying the fire." Meg Stephenson, North Shields

Pink Lint
Biscuit dough cooked, cut into squares, sandwiched with jam and iced with shocking pink icing. (Shiney Row)

Pot Pit
Onion, meat (and vegetables?) cooked in a bowl, with a sealing crust of suet mix. (these were sold as individual portions in Newcastle covered market.)
(James Blenkin, Shildon)

Potted meat
...the cheap cuts of beef boiled for hours with a cow heel, then put into a basin with a plate on top, and held down by a brick until it was solid. (F.M., Ashington)

Prices at Annfield Plain, 1920s
Here are some of the prices of those days:
Coal to puraches, 15 shillings a ton.
Milk 3 pence a pint
Bread small 1d/2d, large 3d/4d. Most people baked their own.
Beef was 5d a pound. (My Mam would send me to McKinley the btucher with half a crown and get some beef for dinner on Sunday.)
Becon, cheese and butter all 4d a pound.
A quarter pound of dairy chocolate was 6d.
A cup of tea 1d, coffee 2d
A meal at Carricks: sausage and chips, bread and butter, tea – 1 shilling; same price for fish or eggs.
A teacher's pay was Ł180 a year.
Rents varied but a council house was 2 shillings a week!”
(Jack Gair)

Rice Cake
4 oz plain flour, half teaspoon baking powder, 2 oz ground rice, 4 oz butter or marge, 4 oz sugar, 2 eggs, grated rind of 1 lemon (optional). Cream butter and sugar; mix dry ingredients together; fold eggs and dry ingredients, in turn, into butter and sugar mixture. Bake in a 1 lb loaf tin, Mk 4 about 1 hour. (Barnard Castle)

Rice Pudding
1 oz rice, 1 oz sugar, 1 pint milk. Bring to boil in saucepan, transfer to baking dish and bake at 'low' until all the liquid absorbed, stirring the rice gently once an hour to stop it clumping,
(BG)

Sandwich filling
“If we had visitors on a Sunday, a tin of salmon was opened, and Mam would make fresh bread crumbs and mix them in a basin with the salmon and some pepper and vinegar. Them make sandwiches – it would stretch further!” (F.M., Ashington)

School Treat
Fingers of rhubarb dipped in a cone of sugar, to eat ont he way to school. (Bill Stephenson, North Shields)

Stottie
"...The broth was a stand-by then, for it was often oot.
Them times when pennies coonted, and the wolf would sniff aboot.
Loaf tins wad line the fenders, for all the wives could bake,
An cooling in the window sill ye'd see a stotty cake."
(from poem sent in by Elsie Ditchburn, Gateshead)

“Stotties would have been made form the dough left over after the bread tins were filled. While the tins were rising the stotties would be baked.” . Shiney Row

Teacake
"My mam, dad and one of my colleagues insist on saying (when they're overjoyed) that they are 'laughing teacakes'. I like it, mainly because its obviously a N.E. thing, and makes zero sense to anyone from outside the region." (Jools Aspinall, Darlington)

Tyneside Xmas Plum Pudding

To make plum pudding to an Englishman's taste;
So all may be eaten and nothing to waste;

Take of the raisins and currants and breadcrumbs all round,
Also suet from oxen and flour, a pound.

Of citron well-candied and lemon as good,
Black treacle and sugar, eight ounces, I would.

Into this compound next must be hasted,
A nutmeg well-grated, ground ginger well-tasted.

With salt to preserve it; a teaspoonful's right;
And further of milk, take half a pint.

Follow with fresh eggs; you may take six.
Be sure after this that you properly mix.

Next tie in a bag just as round as you can;
And hang in a capacious and suitable pan.

Then boil for eight hours as hard as you can;
Brandy to the taste of an English Man.

S.L.Pearce - a recipe of his grandfather's grandfather's elder sister