Local Food and Drink

This weekend began with some real treats. Local delicacies bought from an excellent shop on Bridge Street in Newcastle-under Lyme. There's nothing particularly fancy about these delicacies - and they're almost unknown outside the Potteries. The picture at the top of this blog entry is of some Staffordshire pikelets - a bit like a cross between a pancake and a crumpet, filled with currants or sultanas. They're quite wonderful eaten raw from the packet (when fresh!), or toasted under the grill and spread with butter. Their savoury partner is the almost-world-famous Staffordshire oatcake - a kind of pancake made from oatmeal. They're everywhere round here. Just up the road from us, in Wolstanton, is the William Ambrose oatcake shop at 4 Morris Square. Unprepossessing and a little unpromising from the outside, their oatcakes and pikelets are very good indeed. Not too thick (which is the drawback with the more commercial producers, including the ones that turn up in Sainsbury's & foodie emporiums like the Neals Yard Dairy in London) and beautifully fresh (again, a lack of freshness is a drawback of oatcakes found outside the Potteries).

The Bacon Shop looks like a very good find. A really good selection of bacon and sausages, from local producers like Maynard's and Buttercross - the Buttercross 'prime pork' sausages are very good indeed and make us miss our old Cambridge butchers The Art Of Meat a little bit less! Piles of packets of oatcakes and pikelets on their counter too. The oatcakes were from High Lane Oatcakes in Burslem - which appears to do mail order via their website here. AliB was quite excited when she saw the packet, as they were the oatcakes her dad used to buy on his way back home from work. They were delicious. Again, far thinner than the varieties more widely available with just the right texture. The thicker oatcakes can be a little rubbery, a trace of which survives when they've been toasted, but these were spot on.

How do you eat oatcakes? We got through this latest batch so quickly that there weren't any left to photograph! But our boys like them sweet, spread with honey or chocolate spread. We like them savoury, heated under the grill with strips of cheese. The oatcake can then be rolled around the melted cheese. Even better, fry some rashers of bacon and place a rasher in each oatcake on top of the melted cheese. Roll up and eat with ketchup or brown sauce. As always, the quality of ingredients is the key with a simple dish like this. We used the last of Mrs Bourne's mature cheshire (bought from Eccleshall farmers' market) and some quite wonderful bacon from The Bacon Shop - Maynard's Staffordshire Black (photographed below), dry cured with molasses. When it comes to bacon there's no comparison between the rubbish you get in the supermarket and the firm-textured, tasty rashers like the Maynard's bacon. We're looking forward to trying more of the varieties on offer in weeks to come.


Finally the 'Drink' bit of the title. After our gardening exertions today, we opened a bottle each of the brilliant re-born Worthington's White Shield. Last night we were more local, opting for bottles of Leek Brewery's Rudyard Ruby, a wonderful reddish-brown ale (bottle conditioned) that had a great balance of dark fruit and slightly sour bitterness. We've been impressed by all their beers we've had so far and this brewery, along with Titanic in Burslem and Peakstones near Alton, seems to indicate that local brewing is in reasonably good shape.