Sun 1 Feb is Yorkshire Pudding Day. Yes, the greatest county’s famous batter-based dinner-bulker has a day all of its own. So in preparation for the celebrations, I rode today from Malton to Scarborough through the southern fringes of the North York Moors, for reasons that will become as clear as beef dripping.
Just before hopping on the train to Malton, I had a quick look at a York eat-in/ takeaway that has turned Yorkshire Pudding (YP) into fast food. The York Roast Co load up a wrap made of YP-like material with roast beef, veg and gravy.
It’s quite a mix. As is the feedback I’ve had from friends who’ve tried it. I didn’t; it was still morning, and I had other sources of YP in mind.
Malton styles itself as ‘Yorkshire’s Food Capital’, a fair claim given the number of independent and enticing delis, bakeries, cafes and bistros. And given its number of Greggs or Wetherspoon – zero, of course.
Two murals just off the market square celebrate Malton’s gastro claim. One is a cow. The other is the world’s first published recipe described as ‘Yorkshire Pudding’, in a 1747 book by Hannah Glasse.
AI scraping of others’ work to produce plagiarised summaries is nothing new: that’s what Glasse did, drawing heavily on existing recipe books. In her foreword she apologises for the unsophisticated nature of her language, explaining that it is aimed at the lower classes such as cooks, servants, and cycle tourers.
The dish was well known as ‘dripping pudding’, and why Hannah named it after the great county is not clear. Some suggest it was connected with its mines, whose coal could produce the high temperatures need for the egg/ flour/ {milk or water} mixture to crisp up nicely. Hmm. So how come Welsh is the rarebit, and Yorkshire the pudding? I’m sceptical.
Anyway, heading east out of Malton involved a variety of bike paths alongside the A64, mostly almost-adequate bodges of existing pedestrian footways.
Flat vale-of-Derwent lanes under cloudless winter skies led me to the village of Snainton. I stopped here to peek at Pudding Lane, the only such in Yorkshire. Unlike its notorious counterpart in London, there was no chance of a Great Fire starting here: it was too cold.
Whether Pudding Lane is named after Yorkshire Pudding I doubt. But certainly I grew up eating the stuff, in East Yorkshire. Every Sunday we’d sit down to roast beef and potatoes, veg, gravy, Yorkshire Pudding, the works. ‘Dinner’, it was, being at lunchtime. What we ate at dinnertime we called ‘tea’.
There were no shops or cafes in Snainton to detain me, and the pub, the Coachman, wasn’t open, so I carried on north out of the village on a narrow lane that climbed up in to the southern fringes of the North Yorkshire Moors. The traffic consisted largely of horse riders.
Once at the top, the lanes from here were glorious. Squirrels outnumbered cars, the sky was clear and the air crisp, the shapely hills glowing lime-green. I was taking things carefully: shaded bits of the road still had some icy patches left over from last night’s deep frost.
I stopped to investigate a derelict chapel somewhere in Troutsdale. A painted sign on the door warned me to beware of bees, but there were none. They must have all been away in the hive, huddling for warmth.
It was lovely cycling, quiet, fresh and scenic. The road twisted and turned, rose and fell, and the hillsides slid around me.
A pond just outside Scarborough was still iced over. I’d been right to take care on those frost-pocket roads.
I went through Hackness and cut through the northern bungalows of Scarborough towards Scalby. Here I had a dinner (ie lunch) appointment, thanks to the Old Scalby Mills pub. Its website, when I checked this morning, promised not only fabulous views of Scarborough’s northern seafront, but a Giant Yorkshire Pudding lunch.
Ah. It was closed. Staff shortages.
I headed along the promenade and round the headland to the harbour. Nowhere had Yorkshire Pudding on the menu. Google suggested a few places, but I had no luck at any. The chef was off, they were refurbing the kitchen, they’d had a change of management, they only did it on Sunday, or the website was just wrong. Oh.
Clearly the only way I was going to round off the trip with a Yorkshire Pudding dinner today was at home, for tea. So I got the train back to York.
And no, I don’t mean from that shop I saw this morning. I mean at home home. I made my own Giant Yorkshire Pudding Dinner, with sausages and veg and gravy. It was fab.
Cheers, Hannah, and Happy Yorkshire Pudding Day, everyone.