What is a ‘traditional Yorkshire recipe’?

British regional recipes generally tend to follow the food easily available in any particular place and recipes from Yorkshire are no exception.  The type of work done in an area can also have an impact on what is cooked and when it is served.  Foods, for example, that could be cooked slowly throughout the day (or conversely, prepared and cooked quickly in the late afternoon) were popular when all members of a household were working during the day, but came together for an evening meal.

Many of the recipes shown on this website have their origins in the 19^th century, and often earlier, and are the result of creative cooks using their imagination with food easily available to them in their own kitchen cupboards, back gardens, allotments, or corner shops.  Good and tasty, plain and simple, is the cornerstone for these recipes.  The dishes shown here would have been relatively straight-forward and easy to prepare in a typical kitchen, although more time would have been given to prepare food for special occasions, particularly festivals.

Recipes would have been swopped with neighbours, and later in the 19^th century, with the growth of literacy and rise of the postal services, recipes would have been exchanged with friends and relatives across a wider area of the country, thus broadening the repertoire of cooks.

So although on this website you will find recipes that appear to have their origins in Yorkshire, what can happen is that a recipe will arrive from elsewhere, prove popular, and is then given a regional or whimsical name to put a local stamp on it.  For example, whilst ‘Bald Head Pudding’ sounds daft enough to have come from Yorkshire, on closer examination it proves to be a plain good old steak and kidney pudding found and cooked everywhere – from Barnsley to Brighton.

I have tried then, to include on this website recipes that do appear to have a close link and popular association with the region, and their sources are shown, wherever possible.  However, good recipes don’t recognise borders, so their real origins can often be obscured by the mist of time. Some might even have come from Lancashire!

Colin Neville