> South West

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The Food of the South West
The 6 counties making up the South West region of England - Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall - produce some of the finest and most varied food in the U.K. Try some regional recipes:
Cheese and apple loaf
Farmhouse syllabub
The original Cornish pasty

Most people know about the region's irresistible clotted cream, its renowned Cheddar cheese, Devon beef, Wiltshire ham and bacon, fish and shellfish, apples, Cornish pasties, Somerset cider, scrumpy and it's famous beers.

But lesser known are the other specialist products such as traditionally milled flours, venison, wild boar and buffalo cheeses that have also made their mark.

Sensitive to changing expectations, a good proportion of West Country food is now organically produced. There's a high concentration of small, medium-sized, national and international businesses producing a dazzling range of desirable food, whose taste has been determined by the way the raw ingredients have been produced, well before they get to the kitchen.

Tradition reigns
Not surprisingly, classic recipes abound. Some of the more familiar specialties include...

Bristol Cake (Gloucestershire): a light sponge cake

Devizes Pie (Wiltshire): a layered meat terrine cooked under a huff paste

Lardy Cake: a yeasted dough flavoured with spices and layered with rather more lard than is good for us, but not the same without

Bath Bun: a round, fruited yeasted bun; the Sally Lunn, also a tinned yeasted bun (legend goes that the name derives from the baker, who lived in Bath and, while selling her wares in the street, used to cry out in West Country French, Solet Lune or Soleilume, with reference to the sun represented on top of the bun [egg yolk] and the moon underneath [white dough])

Bath Chaps: a cheap, nutritious delicacy made from pig's cheeks, shaped and coated in egg and breadcrumbs

Cornish Pasty: meat and two veg in pastry, a complete-meal-in-a-wrap - one of the first fast foods

Stargazy Pie: also a West Country classic, epitomised the then flourishing Cornish pilchard industry. The name aptly describes the way the pilchards are arranged under the pastry, with their heads protruding. These, of course, are inedible, but cooked this way, the rich oil can drain back into the pastry during cooking. Folklore has it that fishwives washed their hands in beer to remove the smell of fish. And it works!

Folklore
Other bits of folklore go along with a Dorset cake called Matrimony Cake - more an apple tart really. The girl would bake the 'cake' for her lover and put her shoes in the form of a T (did this stand for 'true', 'tart' or maybe her lover's initial?) and say:
Hoping this night my true lover to see,
I place my shoes in the form of a T.

He presumably got a slice of 'cake' if he turned up and missed out if he didn't! Or this one, where the girl tested the faithfulness of her lover by burning an apple pip on the fire. If it burned quietly, it meant he was false: if it jumped about, then she was assured of his affection:

If you love me pop and fly
If you hate me, lay and die.

The South West, our Riviera, is a good place to head for in the summer or any other time of the year but beware, what we call, the 'blackthorn winter': a cold snap in May when the blackthorn is out. Although a great place to go and holiday, it has also become the place to go for those who enjoy eating good food. The region has acquired celebrity status for gourmet breaks and is rightly is proud of its justified reputation.

Caroline Yates