The bread and butter of dale life, Teesdale Mercury

The bread and butter of dale life

Oct 10, 2007

Do you enjoy your food? I certainly do. And where do you get your food? Do you make use of the excellent eating establishments in the dale? Maybe you grow a lot of your own food - or perhaps you buy most of it at the supermarket or the local store or farmers' market.

There is a lot of food around, coming from all over the world and at all seasons of the year.

We can now purchase strawberries or tomatoes, for instance, in the depths of winter.  We have tremendous choice these days, don't we? However, you don't have to be very old to know that this hasn't always been the case. 30 or 40 years ago there was a revolution in our eating habits - both in the sort of food we ate and where it came from.

Nowadays, production of cereal crops in the form of wheat, barley and oats is confined to the lower parts of Teesdale. The soils are more fertile and it's often a bit warmer there.

Folk used to say that it was an overcoat colder in the upper dale than down in Barney. 

In the not so distant past, however, all three cereal crops were grown on lots of farms all over Teesdale. What's more, that practice had been the norm for many hundreds of years.

The fact that upper Teesdale wasn't exactly suitable for wheat production was in a way irrelevant as far as the locals were concerned. For more than a thousand years, bread was part of our staple diet so it was essential that every community had sufficient supplies of flour.

Of course, when it comes to the growing season and harvest time, no two years are alike. The weather can vary quite a lot - just think of the cool damp summer we have just had! It must have been a big struggle during the cooler years to finish harvesting the grain before the winter cut in.

The Revd WR Bell, who was vicar of Laithkirk from 1864 to 1895, wrote in his parish magazine that the harvest had been delayed until November. In fact it was gathered in while snow was on the ground.

There is evidence that Lunedale wasn't the only part of the upper dales that wheat was grown.

Even on the high ground up in Stainmore, the recent archaeological investigations there have found that wheat had been grown at Spittle on Stainmore throughout the medieval period. In addition, hand querns used by farming families to grind their own flour continue to turn up in stone walls and under hedges throughout our area. If ploughing, sowing and reaping weren't tough enough jobs, don't forget that the corn had to be threshed and winnowed before the slow and laborious process of grinding it by hand.

If you think about it, our ancestors' emphasis on wheat and flour is not really surprising.

Many of you will no doubt remember eating bread and dripping or perhaps bread and jam when you were hungry. And further back in time, slices of bread were used instead of a plate - the original open sandwich. And then again, through much of history and indeed, until fairly recently, the price of corn and of a loaf of bread was a political question.

Perhaps you remember learning about the controversy over the Corn Laws in your school history lessons? It was the biggest political storm of the 1840s. And remember that one of the two principal protagonists was Richard Cobden who was educated at the school based at Woden Croft near Cotherstone.

Today, it's hard to imagine corn growing in the fields there but wheat and barley were grown round Cotherstone and Romaldkirk as late as the 1950s. During the Second World War farmers were given money for growing cereal crops as part of the ‘Dig For Victory' campaign.

That definitely encouraged wheat cultivation

In rural Teesdale before the 19th century most people didn't buy their bread at the local bakers - they made their own. Bread ovens were a bit of a problem though in the days before thatched roofs were replaced with slates or tiles. Bread has to be baked at a high temperature and in stoking up the fire there was a risk that the thatch could go up in flames as well. So bread ovens were often built outside the houses.

In villages, there was often a communal oven - no doubt the origin of the village bakery.

Flour wasn't just used for bread - pastries, and cakes and puddings including of course Yorkshire puddings were all made from wheat flour. All were designed to fill up hungry and hard working people.

Do you remember being served Yorkshire pudding first before the meat arrived? This ploy was designed to reduce the amount of meat consumed by the family. Oats and barley were used for bread and other things as well.

Many dales families began the day with porridge and this was often followed by bacon and eggs - or by a couple of slices of that fabulous fried bread.

My mouth waters at the very thought of it!

First published in the Mercury, October 3, 2007