Losing our rags

Jonathan Schofield eats a pie and gets misty-eyed about Lancashire food

Date Published: 05/03/2009

We’re sending out search parties for local dishes.

Next to Rochdale football club on Willbutt’s Lane is one of the best chippies in the North. The only way I can get the kids to attend a game is if I bribe them with a visit there first.

I recall names of dishes such as slappy - pie on a barmcake, babbies yed - meat pudding (pie), slavvery duck - faggot, scraps - fish batter and chips left in cooking fat/oil, pea wet - juice from peas as in 'chips and pea wet'.

On Saturday we noticed rag pudding on the menu board. Rag pudding...yum.

This was a cracker with the delicate suet pastry hiding a treasure chest of rich beef and gravy with onions. Traditionally rag pudding is cooked wrapped in a muslin cloth rag which makes the pastry as soft and yielding as flesh. Cloth in Lancashire's cotton districts was obviously a readily available commodity.

As soon as the first bite was in my mouth I had one of those Proustian moments and had instant and total recall of my mum’s classic Lancashire cooking.

These were the joys of my youth.

Cow heel pie; steak and gelatinous heel cooked together in gravy under a pastry topping or as a stew.

Tripe; that lovely stomach lining of a cow, eaten cold with plenty of vinegar.

Emerald eggs; fine chopped parsley placed in the buttered cups of the egg poacher and the eggs turned out with the parsley on top.

Glorious Lancashire Hotpot; trimmed lamb chops, potatoes, onions, mushrooms, in layers, with trimmed lambs’ kidneys as an optional extra.

Faggots; off cuts of offal combined to meaty perfection, the Lancashire haggis.

Rag pudding in Rochdale, very very fine

On Bonfire Night, there were black peas, soaked for 24 hours, boiled up and eaten again with copious quantities of vinegar. And alongside black peas, home-made mushy peas.

Manchester tarts begin the local food fight back

Also in autumn there was parkin, a sweet cake of lard, flour, ginger, oatmeal, treacle and ginger.

Black pudding of course.

Home made bread.

There was also the sweet stuff: Manchester tarts, Eccles cakes, trifles, bilberry pie, the berries picked from the moors, apple tarts, scones.

A few weeks ago a visiting journalist asked me what were the Lancashire specialities and I ran through the list above, but also including cheeses and daft sweets such Uncle Joe’s Mintballs and Love Hearts.

I mentioned drinks too such as the vast amount of ales from the region and temperance drink survivals such as Vimto. I referred to Fitzpatricks Herbal Health, the temperance bar in Rawtenstall, with its lush dandelion and burdock, sarsaparilla, black beer and so forth.

He noted the drinks and the various places he could buy them, and he sought out the cheeses in the delis.

“But where can you go to eat cow heel pie, tripe, rag pudding?” he rang back.

That was a bugger. I could scarcely think of anywhere. At least now I know where there’s rag pudding and I know black pies are available at Stalybridge buffet bar.

So that’s why we’re sending out the search parties. Or maybe we need to open a Lancashire and north west food gaff in town?

We have a rich tradition of regional food here, as rich as anywhere in Northern Europe, so where’s it gone?

If you can let us know of any local dishes in pubs, restaurants, cafes and chippies across the region, we’d be grateful.