Food memory
In Lancashire, rolls are known as 'barm cakes'. A kind of flat floury white roll as big as a toolmaker's hand. The ones with very dark brown undersides are called 'oven bottoms'. The joy of this food begins at the point of sale, as they would normally be purchased at the local bakeries which in Lancashire are called 'confectioners'. Most of these establishments were family run affairs selling bread, pies and cakes.
The pies are generally awesome with rich crumbly pastry and generous highly seasoned fillings with cakes of the desiccated coconut and butter cream variety and those individual strawberry tarts with the highly suspicious red jelly. Loaves come in large, medium or Hovis. None of your artisan sourdough nonsense here! Buying it ready-sliced was considered go-ahead.
The interior design of these shops is always at least a decade behind. It's the rules and part of the joy to enter a world of shiny brown wood-grain patterned melamine, glass fronted chiller cabinets with while plastic trays on sloping shelves and if you were very lucky indeed, a life-sized blind boy with stick and guide dog, moulded in fibre glass with a slot in his head for coins.
You stand in line behind chattering women in raincoats or pinnies, holding their leatherette or string shopping bags while always cheerful counter assistants in white nylon coats and latterly food hygiene hairnets, place the purchases in white paper bags with the shop's name and logo screen printed in blue ink on the front.
If you were at home and you saw a white cardboard box being produced from a shopping bag, you knew you were in for a treat. At the very least you were assured a jam doughnut or if the god's are smiling, a vanilla slice.
Long live the Lancashire barm cake! It's why the war or the roses was fought. It featured large in the sacking of the production designer for Hetty Wainthrop investigates..."I asked for barm cakes not baps!". The barm cake made us what we are today..type 2 diabetes mainly. "Do you want Lurpack on yours?"
The pies are generally awesome with rich crumbly pastry and generous highly seasoned fillings with cakes of the desiccated coconut and butter cream variety and those individual strawberry tarts with the highly suspicious red jelly. Loaves come in large, medium or Hovis. None of your artisan sourdough nonsense here! Buying it ready-sliced was considered go-ahead.
The interior design of these shops is always at least a decade behind. It's the rules and part of the joy to enter a world of shiny brown wood-grain patterned melamine, glass fronted chiller cabinets with while plastic trays on sloping shelves and if you were very lucky indeed, a life-sized blind boy with stick and guide dog, moulded in fibre glass with a slot in his head for coins.
You stand in line behind chattering women in raincoats or pinnies, holding their leatherette or string shopping bags while always cheerful counter assistants in white nylon coats and latterly food hygiene hairnets, place the purchases in white paper bags with the shop's name and logo screen printed in blue ink on the front.
If you were at home and you saw a white cardboard box being produced from a shopping bag, you knew you were in for a treat. At the very least you were assured a jam doughnut or if the god's are smiling, a vanilla slice.
Long live the Lancashire barm cake! It's why the war or the roses was fought. It featured large in the sacking of the production designer for Hetty Wainthrop investigates..."I asked for barm cakes not baps!". The barm cake made us what we are today..type 2 diabetes mainly. "Do you want Lurpack on yours?"
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