Multimedia Journalist
Bringing Suffolk Cooking Back To Life
Can you guess what these are?
Recipe Revivals
An old Suffolk recipe book discovered in the back of my mother’s kitchen drawer acted as the inspiration for Recipe Revivals.
Suffolk rusks, goosegog pudding, bloater savoury, Felixstowe tart, these bygone recipes, unknown to me, sounded simultaneously rustic, exotic and mysterious.
Childhood memories came flooding from my parents as we leafed through the faded pages, reminiscing over the region’s history well into the evening.
Bookmarking the most intriguing dishes became a colourful but redundant exercise with most pages earmarked.
Feeling inspired, a few more cookbooks were sourced for reference, the final collection consisting of Julia Skinner’s A Taste of East Anglia, Molly Perham’s Suffolk Country Recipes and Dorothy Baldock’s Favourite Suffolk Recipes. All three books contain beautiful historical regional photos or dish illustrations to pore over.
East Anglia boasts a gently undulating countryside with a coastline of low cliffs and dunes, river mouths flowing to the sea. Ideal agricultural lends itself to wheat and all sorts of vegetables and fruit.
Coined the “Larder for London”, Suffolk was known for producing luxury goods for the capital, particularly pork, poultry, game and butter.
This commercial success meant that the finest produce was often sold away, leaving locals with the more “frugal” remains like Suffolk Bang cheese, a skimmed milk cheese so tough that rats could not penetrate the rind.
A coastline rich in seafood, there was a thriving herring trade out of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth which attracted thousands of seasonal workers a year.
Being a Professional Patisserie and Confectionery graduate I have a partiality for the pastry and desserts recipes first and foremost so this collection is inclined as such, for now at least.
Each original recipe was followed as closely as is reasonably possible, sometimes deviated from, then in some cases a leap has been taken to the creation of a new recipe with a modern twist, using the original as inspiration.
Applying a logical framework to the order in which these recipes were selected may have been appropriate, based on the seasonal availability of ingredients or dish type perhaps, but so far in reality, I have gone for the ones I felt like eating at the time.
There are plans to revive recipes throughout East Anglia and beyond with an ordered and methodical approach, but for now let’s start with the humble Suffolk rusk.
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