Continuing our tour of the Peak District we visited the Bakewell Show; an annual riot of food, drink, cattle, dogs, manure, mud, wellies, dogs, smells, jousting knights, dogs and farm machinery that can take your arm off in seconds.
Pudding or tart it doesn’t really resemble the product that Mr Kipling has been selling all these years, (no cherry on top) nor my nemesis, his other themed tea time treat the Bakewell Slice. I say nemesis because I adored that day glow pink confection well into my twenties until suddenly it stopped loving me back. One slice would make me extremely nauseous an hour later, something to do with my growing intolerance to processed fats I was informed in A&E, and so regretfully the slice and I went our separate ways.
Quite frankly I don’t much like the look of these Puddings either. People are emerging from shops carrying them in paper bags that are rapidly becoming translucent from the amount of fat leeching into them and many a tourist is taking a bite, chewing thoughtfully, then somewhat desperately, with bulging hamster cheeks, looking around for a litter bin. The recipe is a closely guarded secret apparently, although Heston Blumentahl could probably reverse engineer the formula from one of the bin samples if he really wanted. The Bakewell Tart Shop & Coffee House in Matlock Street, yes that is its real name, claims to have the original recipe locked in its safe and mutterings in the town say that they want the Pudding given protected status so that only if made in Bakewell can it be called a Bakewell Pudding. Mr Kipling is no doubt already briefing his exceedingly good lawyers.
And why not let the buffalo roam over the Peaks? A whole stall was devoted to the minced and sliced remains of Water Buffalo farmed in the area. Saved from extinction after being hunted remorselessly by ancestral Peak People, the water buffalo is now back in greater numbers than ever before, breeding in rural bus stops and towns and…. well no, it’s an imported species obviously, but one that likes it in the Peaks where it is quite at home eating lots of vegetation and standing with its feet in puddles. There’s a Southerner’s stereotyping joke in there, but I’d like to go back and not get a tar and feather overcoat.
It was raw, which is fine by me, and came in two sorts – heavily larded with fat or just pinpricked. There was also a vegetarian version, but I treated that with the scorn it deserved and pretended not to see it. It may have been very nice for all I knew, but it wasn’t a black pudding. By judicious choosing of stalls and adopting the expression of a dog looking for dinner, I managed to get samples off everybody – some cooked, some not – and the sausages -cooked- were great. I bought a big bag of black puddings, some fabulous pork scratchings, both from New Close Farm from nearby Over Haddon (they also do a mean pork pie), a bag of Derbyshire oatcakes which were spongy and filling and a bargain at £1 a bag and a cheese called a bouncing bomb which I somehow lost somewhere in the outfield so I can’t tell you what it was like.
Pausing only to watch the jousting knights, who are actually very good but to be honest I had already seen them earlier at the Lambeth County Show, that bucolic festival that normally ends at nightfall with some traditional country sports such as rap, reggae and knifing.
No such fear here, the crowds milling about were happy as can be as the sun came out raising mystical mist over the hills nearby. A local TV presenter celebrity was being mobbed by kids and my bag of food and drink was getting heavy. Time to go back to The Peacock, I felt, stopping briefly at Buxton on the way to enjoy its famous water straight from the tap in the town centre and to admire the old music hall, part of a regeneration programme that is positively transforming this spa town.
The next day would be back to London, but this whole wonderful world of warm people, warm pies and yes, actually, warm and sunny weather, is so easy to get to by train or car that for me it will be somewhere to revisit as I hand only scraped the surface