Our favourite regional foods
The lovefood team pick our top local delicacies from around the UK, and we want to hear about yours.
This year's Great British Menu is reaching its climax, so we thought it was time to look at our favourite regional foods from across these lands we live in. And, coincidentally, we've got one from the north, one from the midlands and one from the south.
Andrew Webb – Editor
My favourite regional dish has to be a Melton Mowbray pork pie. A dish equally at home on the Christmas buffet table as it is in on the picnic rug. Cool crumbly pastry, the quiver of jelly, and the spicy meat within, it can only really be improved by a glass of beer and a blob of mustard.
Another reason to love it is that it became the poster boy for raising awareness of PGI products in this country, we now have 44 products, but we should aim to protect more.
In a town like Melton Mowbray, there's a fair amount of rivalry around pies, but just as there's no one definitive champagne, there is no one definitive pork pie. Each of the producers, both large and small, have their subtle differences (the one in the photo above is a Dickinson & Morris). It's all down to taste and preference and together they take pride in the pies and bringing the joy of them to a wider audience.
Charlotte Morgan – Writer
My favourite regional dish is Bakewell Pudding. Not the tart produced by Mr Kipling et al, but the sticky, oozing, and right ugly Derbyshire treat.
I have family who live on the edge of the Peak District but, despite having visited them 30-odd times, it wasn’t until last year that I explored Bakewell. Three shops in the pretty village offer what they each claim is the ‘original’ Bakewell pudding recipe – my money’s on The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, which is where I tried my first one.
It’s a great big blob of a thing, with flaky pastry on the outside and a speckled custard tart-ish filling on the inside. We took one home, warmed it in the oven, and shared a ‘small’ pudding (meant for two) between four. I, the ‘soft southern jessie’ of the pack, was the only one who licked her plate clean. It oozed a glorious butter almond mix as I plunged in my fork, and made my teeth sting with its jammy sugars. Aftwerwards, I lay on the sofa, incapacitated, for the next hour.
Simon Ward – News Editor
I'm going back to my childhood for a local delicacy that conjures up memories of endless warm summer days on Dorset beaches (my selective memory is ignoring the hot, sticky, fume-clogged traffic jams before and after). And that delicacy is the humble pea fritter.
Yes, I love our cheeses, our meats, our pies, our cakes and puddings, our fruit and our veg, but mushy peas fried in soft golden batter and lightly coated in salt and vinegar is the thing that really does it for me. You don't see it on chip shop menus north of the M25 (to my knowledge anyway), meaning it's a truly local dish.
The satisfying light crunch as you bite into it for the first time, breaking through the batter wall into the gooey, gently minted mass at its heart is an experience to savour.
Come rain or shine, it's the original British beachside street food snack, with a little bit of a healthy soul to boot.
Photo courtesy of I like on Flickr
What are your favourite regional dishes? Let us know in the Comments box below.
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