A Taste of Cumbria The Hairy Bikers' Comfort Food

We've travelled the world. We've eaten everywhere

from roadside bars to restaurants with Michelin stars.

But there really is nothing like a bit of home cooking.

Coming into a warm kitchen, filled with the aroma

of a tasty meal bubbling away.

It's one of life's great pleasures.

Lovingly prepared dishes with flavours that pack a punch.

It's the perfect way to put smiles on the faces

of your nearest and dearest.

'We also discover the secrets to producing quality ingredients...'

The smell is absolutely fantastic.

'..drop in on some of the UK's homeliest tearooms and cafes, and...'

Service!

'..find out what chefs like to cook on their days off.'

-Oh!

-That is amazing!

This is much easier and much quicker.

There's nothing quite as comforting as simple home cooking.

Today, recipes from my neck of the woods -

Cumbria.

We're creating glorious dishes to remind me of home,

using the most amazing local produce.

The Cumberland sausage, the most famous sausage in the world.

This is like a shortened version.

It's a bit like those kind of cut-down novels,

do you know what I mean?

SI LAUGHS

But it's quite acceptable for a tray bake.

First off, some oil in your tin.

I want onion wedges.

I tell you what I'm doing,

I'm just going to prepare this butternut squash.

Now you could use other sausages but, you know,

-I like Cumberland sausages because they're peppery...

-They are.

..and they're full of meat.

So we're going to add bone-in chicken thighs.

The reason that we get the bone on, it just adds flavour, doesn't it?

And the beautiful, beautiful skin goes all crispy

and lovely and you want that, it's a comforting dish this, it's lush.

You could take the skin off if you wanted,

you could take the bones out.

Cumberland sausage in there as well.

Lovely. And then on top of that...

You haven't peeled the squash!

Well, it's rustic, innit?!

It's kind of, all the ingredients in this are pretty basic,

and it's great because it's quick.

Now I'm just going to strip some thyme onto there.

Sprinkle it all over.

While Dave's doing that, I'm going to put a little bit of salt

and some pepper in there as well.

A good glug of olive oil on top of there.

Now, I've got 100ml of water and 50ml of red wine.

And that's it for the first stage.

We pop that into a preheated oven, 180 degrees Celsius,

for half an hour.

-Did you ever do Cumberland wrestling?

-Oh, yeah!

No, you'll hurt yourself.

I'll be all right, gentle.

Cumberland wrestling, it's like sumo but they wear like white tights

and you stand on a hilltop, and you go like this, you go...

And then you try to flip each other up.

I quite like that.

Get off me now.

No, no, we've done the demonstration.

Right. See you in a bit.

Lovely.

HE CHUCKLES

It's bits like this that really brighten up your dish.

There's nothing goes better than chicken and mushrooms,

sausage and mushrooms.

So I'm going to put a layer of sliced mushies on,

and again, keeping this quite rustic.

See, that's just started to turn now, hasn't it.

-It's lush.

-That looks nice, Kingy.

-Doesn't it?

-Now the glaze.

We have a tablespoon of maple syrup.

It's a lovely glaze, this.

Oh, aye.

And a teaspoon of red wine vinegar.

So we've got sweet and savoury.

-So you're just dabbing that on, aren't you?

-Yeah.

-That's nice.

You get an even more even coating then, don't you?

You do, on the sausage as well.

There we go.

Now because we Cumbrians are bang on in the 21st century -

it's not traditional but we like a bit of oomph

and it can be cold up there -

so I reckon about half a teaspoon of chilli flakes.

Beautiful.

Roast for a further 25-30 minutes until everything is cooked through

and well browned.

Now alongside this, we're going to serve some cavolo nero.

It's like a super-duper cabbage, fresh from the garden.

It is quite a robust green, this.

And although it's not fashionable,

-it's quite nice if it's cooked down for quite a while.

-Mm.

-Smell that, straight from the garden.

-Oh, beautiful!

I like cavolo nero because there's a slight bitterness to it,

-and depth.

-Yeah.

-It's great.

Great with pasta, isn't it? Or great with minestrone.

-We might as well chuck this thyme in, eh?

-Why not?

I'll strip it off first. We don't want stalks.

That's so lovely. A proper winter green, isn't it, that?

I love it. Do you want some lemon zest?

Please, man. Put a little bit of salt in there as well.

Add a little bit of water.

Not too much. What we'll do...

..a little bit of nutmeg in that.

Nutmeg's great on spinach, too, isn't it?

-It's lovely.

-Beautiful.

Right, a little bit. Shall we turn that off?

You don't want to burn the 'meg.

Perfect.

It's surprising, isn't it? You just cook it down for about 15 minutes,

20 minutes, boom, done.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Oh!

Get in.

All that walking and drinking tea, dude, I'm exhausted!

And that's what you need.

-Look at that.

-Oh, look at that.

And did you know what we call pork sausages up where I'm from?

Snadgers. Look at the blush on those snadgers.

You know why they call sausages bangers?

Cos in World War II, you know,

they used to pump the sausages full of water to make them go further.

You put them on a plate and they went bang.

That's why they're called bangers. But these are Cumbrian snadgers.

I've got to go for a sausage.

Oh.

Oh, that takes me back.

That's a proper midweek winter's dish.

Or after a hike on a Sunday.

That cavolo nero is superb.

Isn't it?

It's indulgent, it's unctious and buttery.

Tell you what though, dude...

I might be rustic but I think if we're doing this again,

we'll peel the butternut squash.

Aye 'appen.

Nothing beats a bit of home cooking, but every now and then

it's nice to have someone else cook for you.

Thankfully, all over the country there are tasty places

that make us feel right at home.

My name's Doug Gillam.

I own and run Gillam's Tearoom in Ulverston, Cumbria.

Ulverston is a very well-preserved traditional market town

but it has a really quirky edge to it.

My family had a grocers directly across the road.

And that closed in 1994.

In 2005, we saw the building across the road for sale

and we thought it would be great to bring the family name back.

We bit the bullet and went for it, and it's paid off,

we're here ten years later.

A real big focus of the tearoom is the tea.

I absolutely love tea.

We have 108 loose-leaf teas.

They're all organic, many of them are Fairtrade.

It's such a wonderful tradition, a proper teacup and saucer,

Teapot with extra hot water, a tea strainer.

One of the best selling things we have are the teacakes.

People love a tea cake. They're comforting,

a great accompaniment to a cup of proper tea.

I make my teacakes with strong flour, mixed fruit, spices,

a bit of oil, sugar and yeast and water, of course.

I mix it all together in the mixer...

..take it out, give it a good kneading.

This is my nana's sifter shaker that I inherited from her.

It makes me think of her each time I do it,

and baking with her when I was a kid.

Now I'm going to put this on here for ten or 15 minutes.

I think the teacakes are popular because I put

plenty of fruit in them and they're spiced, and they're a decent size.

This little bit of dough I make into a tea cake for my daughter

for when she comes back from school.

She comes in about half three and has a little snack.

We have an eclectic mix of customers.

Everybody's welcome and everybody gets on.

People chat to each other, table to table.

We have a laugh together.

Teacake John comes in every day on his bike,

cycles in about three miles,

tried all the 108 teas on our menu.

He sits quietly upstairs and studies

and then potters off back home again.

I'll have my usual.

-Ceylon Highlands.

-Ceylon Highlands.

-And a teacake.

-And a teacake.

-Could have guessed!

-It's a teacake for John, please.

-OK.

Incredibly, I've been having tea and a teacake almost every day

for years and years.

I've been to many teahouses but...

..this teacake is the best I've tasted.

There we are, John.

It's full of flavour, it's spicy, it's just very nice.

It's always very friendly, always the same.

A nice welcome and, of course, in the winter, a nice fire.

People will say hello to you, you can strike up

conversations with people even if you're not sitting there.

It's quite difficult, actually, just to come and meet

one friend in Gillam's because everybody kind of chats.

It's really important to me that the food represents us and our beliefs.

Everybody that comes in gets a bit of love.

You can't talk about Cumbrian food without mentioning...

..the shank.

Lamb shanks are brilliant, aren't they?

Well, they're a cheap cut, they're amazingly tasty,

and Cumbria produced some of the nicest shanks I have ever had.

I'm going to brown these lamb shanks off in our casserole dish

just to get a bit of colour on them.

So these are flageolet beans. They've been soaked overnight.

I pop them into the water and boil them for ten minutes.

So, while Mr King's browning off, I'll get on my veggies.

So to skin tomatoes, put a cross across the base like so...

..and plunge them into boiling water for about 30 seconds.

Just to release the skin.

And then we plunge into iced water

and the skin will curl up, fall off,

then I deseed them and set them aside for later.

When I was a kid,

the core of the tomatoes and the skin, I had my own word for it.

I used to call them the cods.

I remember saying to my mother,

"Mother, I don't like my tomatoes with the cods in."

And I don't know where it came from but since then,

even if I have tinned tomatoes, I always cut out the cods.

The skin just peels off.

Now you plunge it into cold water to cool the tomatoes down,

to basically stop it cooking.

Just take the...

the cods out. Like so.

The veggies I start off with are finely chopped fennel,

carrots and onions.

Right, I'm going to take these out and set them aside,

-ready for your veggies.

-Brilliant.

Right, so I'll put this in to sweat down.

That just needs to moulder away for about ten minutes.

Meanwhile, I'll get ready for the second flavour infusion,

and I'll just deseed and chop me chilli.

I'm going to chop the garlic for this, I want it a little bit...

a little bit rustic.

A sprig of thyme, I'm going to put this in in its entirety

and we can fish it out. A bay leaf.

A teaspoon of smoked paprika.

-Lovely.

-Smoked paprika's brilliant.

It's kind of sweet, it's mild,

it kind of gives everything a nice barbecuey flavour.

And 100ml of dry white wine.

-Some tomato puree.

-Oh!

A tin of anchovies.

Since Victorian times, anchovies have been used to season lamb.

And just push that through.

And we just need to reduce that by half.

Right, mate. Pop in your shanks.

Look at the colour. It's beautiful.

-Are you going to stand them up like little soldiers?

-I think so.

Our cooked beans go in the top. They are almost buried in them.

Now stock.

Use lamb stock if you can get it.

If not, well, beef or chicken will do fine.

Now put that in a preheated oven, 170 degrees Celsius,

for an hour and a half.

-Right.

-Right.

Right. It's been an hour and a half, it's time for those tomatoes.

Just pop them in.

And there are going to cook down, to give us a bit more flavour.

And that goes back into the oven for another hour and a half.

Slow, slow, quick-quick-slow.

-Well, we're nearly there, Kingy.

-That's it, dude.

-A bit of mustard mash.

-Mustard mash. I'll mash.

-Are you ready for the butter?

-I am, mate.

-Salt?

-Yes, please.

Oh, Dave, look. It's come up lovely, that mash.

Oh, it has, it has.

And mustard.

-I think that should be enough.

-Perfect, Mr Myers.

Let's get the shanks.

You know when you cook lamb shanks,

there's always a sense of anticipation, isn't there?

That's what I love about casseroles, taking the lid off.

Oh, where've they gone?

You have to be careful, they're dropping to pieces.

Oh, look at that!

-Oh, I'm going to have a taste.

-Definitely.

Oh, man!

Big, bold, comforting flavours.

-Wonderful.

-The beans are superb.

Lamb's been around for thousands of years and do you know,

Cumbria has some wonderful lamb.

I think this really does it justice.

The stunning scenery of my home county, Cumbria, has long attracted

poets and artists who found inspiration in the landscape.

But the Lake District is fast becoming a culinary hotspot,

attracting visitors who go there for its fabulous food.

At Hillthwaite House Hotel near Lake Windermere,

chef Eve Townsend shares her idea of perfect comfort food.

The food that we cook here is quintessentially English.

I've always been a big fan of British cooking,

especially about local produce.

It's something that I had grounded into me as a junior chef.

You know, why not use local and get the best?

I love food. Never trust a skinny chef.

You've always got to be eating and tasting the food.

I like to keep things simple and keep the flavours

really shining through.

Ultimately, at the end of the day it's got to look nice

but, you know, you really want it to taste good.

Service.

'Being a female head chef is probably no different

'to being a male head chef. You're still doing the same job.'

Chickens.

'There does seem to be a few more of us now coming up to higher levels,

'which is good.'

25 chicken breasts.

Is this what you've ordered?

-Pigeon?

-Yeah.

'I used to wait on, when I was 15, it was my first job, and I loved it,

'I loved the buzz and the sort of the social aspect, I think.

'And then I went to university and did hospitality management,

'where I decided I didn't want to deal with the customers,

'I was better behind doors where I could actually feel a little bit

'more creative, and that's how I fell into the kitchen

'and I've been there ever since.'

I used to cook at home with my mum when I was little.

I used to cut everything up really tiny.

I used to spend time making sure that everything was aligned

and really small. When my mum would get home,

she'd always cook us, usually something from scratch, as well.

We were brought up on traditional home-cooked type food.

I'm a mum. I've got one son, he's called Arthur and he's five.

My husband's a chef so I think our whole life still revolves around food.

We sit down and have a family meal whenever we're at home together,

which is difficult with the hours we both work.

We always make sure there's something hearty,

you know, meat and two veg, the classic, what your gran used to do.

One of my sort of go-to dishes that I'd make for a good hearty tea

would be something like a cottage pie.

I do make my cottage pie with mince.

Every now and again I try to use some of the lesser-used cuts of meat,

and they're cheap and actually so much more flavoursome,

so doing cheeks and things like that,

plus I've got access to some really great butchers through work.

So why compromise on the quality at home?

Food plays an essential part in family life.

I think for everybody, perhaps more so at my house,

with having two chefs as parents.

My ethos in home cooking has always been

whatever me and Brian are eating, Arthur will have the same.

I'm not making my own stock at home.

There's nothing wrong with... just using a convenience stock.

There it goes.

That's it now. Day off.

There we go.

'I try to be at home as much as I can for my little boy,

'which is hard, being a chef, but time at home is precious.'

Mummy...

Arthur.

There she is.

I'm warm now.

'So one of Arthur's favourite foods, is he loves mashed potato,

'or should I say he loves Mummy's mashed potato.

'He likes to taste it and tell me if I need to adjust the seasoning.'

Arthur, do you want to come and try the mash?

Good.

Is the seasoning OK?

Thank you.

'He came home from school the other week and said,

' "Mummy, you need to go into school and tell those two ladies

' "how to make mash."

'So I've not actually been in yet but I'm going to put it on my

'agenda to maybe go and give them a few pointers!'

Here we go.

'I think it's really important we try to sit down for a family meal as much as we can.

'It's something that I did when I was growing up

'and it's something that I really want to pass on to Arthur.'

You know, Si, if I had to pick one signature dish,

certainly for South Cumbria,

it's got to be Morecambe Bay potted shrimps.

It's such a great product.

Hand picked Morecambe Bay shrimps are wonderful.

They're the little brown shrimps.

We had this idea that you always finish off a risotto with butter.

Well, the shrimps are potted with mace, with butter, salt and pepper,

and it's the most wonderful thing is to float the shrimps into risotto

and make a Morecambe Bay shrimp risotto.

What we're going to serve this with is a fennel and orange salad

with harissa dressing. And it's really simple.

All I'm doing at the minute is I'm just segmenting an orange.

I have to tell you,

it was funny because this salad was one of Si's inventions

and I knew it was a special salad.

He phoned me up to tell me about his salad with his harissa dressing.

Oh, it's great!

We start off with some butter.

So the butter doesn't burn, some oil.

I'm going to sweat this onion down.

I'm going to grate a couple of courgettes.

The courgettes really add something to it, apart from just colour.

Right, so that's me segmented orange into my bowl with the rocket.

Now the red onion, it's just thin wedges.

Not only are you starting to build flavour now,

you're also starting to build texture,

and that's important in a salad.

The mandolin.

Now unfortunately my fennel is not in a shape where you can use

the guard.

So Kingy is about to do this without the aid of a guard.

And you need to get it as thin as you can.

Now, to the onions, I'm going to add my courgettes.

Start cooking these down.

Then I'm going to grate two cloves of garlic.

So your fennel

goes in to your bowl.

Now at this point, just mix it up a bit.

To the onion, the garlic and courgettes, the zest of a lemon.

So I'm going to start with a dressing now.

Microplane if you can, if not, crush your garlic.

Just do it straight into the jar that you're going to shake

-your dressing together in.

-Now I put this rice into this mixture

and just cook for a minute or so

until the rice is beautifully coated with the butter

and starts to take flavour from the garlic,

the onions and the courgettes and lemon.

A little bit of white wine vinegar on top of the garlic.

So about two tablespoons.

Runny honey.

About two tablespoons.

A teaspoon of coriander.

And some harissa. There's two types of harissa.

There's harissa harissa and then there's rose harissa.

Rose harissa tends to be slightly lighter,

so it's not a massively powerful hit of chilli,

but it's more the flavour.

So this is rose harissa, which is what we're using now.

Now the little bit that matters.

Using wine or vermouth.

I'm using vermouth.

It's traditional to do this with a risotto

and the thing is the wine or the alcohol,

it kind of softens the rice and you get a better finish,

and also it's good for flavour.

I'm going to cook this until all the alcohol has boiled away

and it looks quite dry. Then we start with the stock.

The secret of good risotto really is to use hot stock.

You want this just off the boil.

Add the stock, a ladle at a time, and keep stirring...

..until the rice is cooked and all the stock's absorbed.

I'm using chicken stock for this.

You could just as easily use vegetable stock.

A wee bit of olive oil.

Salt, and a couple of twists of fresh-ground black pepper.

Give this dressing a really good shake.

Taste it.

So just on this salad as well I've got about 25 grams of sultanas.

They're little bombs of sweetness.

Now, you can use almonds.

But here we've got some peanuts,

but I'm just going to crush those peanuts down.

It's funny, you know, you look at the back of your risotto rice packet

and it says, "Cook for 10-15."

-It always seems to take a lot, lot longer to cook risotto.

-It does, it does.

Mmm.

-Now this is the little engine room.

-Get in.

Pots of potted shrimps.

Now obviously we don't need any more butter in the risotto to finish it off

because the shrimps are going to do that for us.

And that buttery, shrimpy...

Oh, what!

This is Morecambe meets Milan, this.

Just give that a stir through and let the butter yield to the ricey loveliness.

Oh, my goodness me.

And there's a lot of flavour in those shrimps.

Now the parmesan.

And use good parmesan cheese.

You've got mace in the potted shrimps.

Mace is like the outside coating of nutmeg,

so to me it makes sense just to finish with a bit of nutmeg.

Then stir in a few basil leaves.

Pour the dressing over the salad,

toss lightly together and serve immediately.

-To me, Morecambe Bay shrimps were always special.

-Aye.

I still think they're special.

They're not a cheap option,

but three small pots of potted shrimps in this risotto,

it's going to feed six people.

And look at that.

You know, sometimes I think when we do stuff, Si, and you think,

-we've got this right, haven't we?

-That's right.

-It doesn't get much better than this.

-Absolutely not.

That goes so well.

Do you know, I could eat this till I popped.

The secret to creating good grub is using the right ingredients.

The real work is done by the producers who put all their passion

and expertise into getting their ingredients just right.

I'm Jane, and I live at a house called Dalemain which is in Cumbria.

Marmalade has been my passion.

I adore it.

I talk about it a lot.

It struck me that actually it would be quite fun to set up a competition

in cahoots with the WI to find out

whether people could learn more about it and whether we could

really start young people making marmalade.

So the recipe that I'm going to make today is one that my mother used.

I think it's called an economy marmalade.

Three fruit, so it's grapefruit, lemon and sweet orange.

We've got a lovely sort of sophisticated overlaying sharpness to it.

What I love about the way marmalade is made is that, probably, it hasn't

changed in all the centuries that it's been made.

You take a skillet, you put water in it and you boil things up.

It's all very, very similar.

So this is where I'm doing a bit of cheating, because I'm using a

pressure cooker and it has to be said that my mother used a pressure cooker,

so it's probably an influence from there,

that wonderful sound of the hissing and smashing, but it does make the

fruit very soft for chopping.

Having steamed it for about 20 minutes and let it cool down,

take it out of the pressure cooker, lovely and soft,

chop it up nice and quickly, in nice big chunks,

and take out all the pips at that point.

So one of the things which is important is getting the size of the chunks right.

Now, "right" means whatever it is that you like.

So for some people, like my husband,

he would probably prefer no chunks at all.

And for me, as I'm chopping now, I think this is marmalade for me,

probably, because I'm going to make nice big chunks.

Roughly chopped, for everyday marmalade, I think is good.

It means you can do it very, very quickly.

You're not chopping it up into tiny little bits and it has a bit of body

to it, and I think body in marmalade is a really lovely thing.

It's got texture.

I love marmalade because it has so many facets to it.

It's something about making it and making it with other people,

which I love. It's something about the scent of it,

the aroma, which is extraordinary.

It's all part of our heritage.

We've had it as a little golden thread coming through from the earliest of times.

Even Queen Elizabeth I was eating marmalade.

So I'm going to get the sugar

and I'm going to put it into this lovely warm oven

and let it just warm through.

Because what I want is for it to melt into my marmalade,

my peel mixture as quickly as possible.

So that will just warm now.

When you're making marmalade, getting to what is called, I think,

a rolling boil, and it's a sizzling boil, it's wonderful.

And if you've ever been to a marmalade factory,

where they still cook marmalade by the open pan method,

it's the same thing. You have this sizzling effect of the sugar boiling

in the marmalade and it gets to a point where you just know that it's ready.

However, my mother always used to do the saucer test.

So it looks like it's ready.

It's just got a delicious colour to it.

It's been rolling boiling for a bit.

So I'm going to try this saucer test,

which has been tried and tested over centuries, I'd have thought.

You put a tiny bit in a saucer,

and I'm going to pop it in the fridge

and see whether we can make it wrinkle.

I've made marmalade since I was a child, but when I got married,

I moved to Dalemain and found this extraordinary book,

which is a recipe book, and it dates back to the 1600s.

They were collected by somebody called Elizabeth Rainbowe,

and she was the Bishop of Carlisle's wife.

And she clearly loved good food.

We have tried quite a number of the recipes in the book

and particularly with marmalade.

Actually marmalade is a wonderful process,

which probably hasn't changed over time.

These recipes are very similar to what I do today,

only I'm probably slightly lazier,

so I'm not going to take so much time over it.

Perfect.

And you just want it to rest for a minute.

Just to...

let the shred get settled.

The strength of marmalade is that it is quintessentially British and it

comes right from our roots.

This is something that people remember doing with their granny.

That granny probably did it with her granny and so it's going back

centuries of time, where people have just made this delicious thing.

And the satisfaction of having 12 lovely jars of marmalade is immense.

-Oh, Kingy.

-What?

-That's the first date you've had for a bit, isn't it?

It flaming is, dude, I tell you! Look at that!

But dates are the secret to a good sticky toffee pudding.

This goes back to old-fashioned times.

Cartmel is near where I live

and sticky toffee pudding is said to have originated there.

Now don't bombard me if it's wrong, but, you know, for me,

Cartmel sticky toffee pudding -

eee...stick to yer ribs - it's lovely.

That'll do us.

So one teaspoon of bicarb, just sprinkle it over.

And then there's exactly measured...

..300ml of boiling water.

And you just let that sit while Dave makes the batter.

First up, I have some butter, which I'm going to cream

with some soft brown sugar and some muscovado sugar.

So, what I'll do now is I'll break an egg into there.

So it doesn't separate,

what I'm going to do, while Dave's whisking that,

I'll just add a spoonful of flour.

Beautiful.

And now we crack in another egg.

And another spoonful of flour.

I mean, there's such a debate around who originated,

what is a genuine sticky toffee pudding.

I think it's something that's come out of the gingerbread that goes

back to the 18th century, you know?

It's coming together. I think we can get the rest of the flour in now, do you?

Yeah. Absolutely.

And I just put the rest of the flour in.

I always remember one of the earliest sticky toffee puddings

that I made was Delia Smith's.

And Delia was the one who said the secret is the dates.

What they do is they enrich the pudding and they make it sticky.

-They do.

-We've got the toffee sauce.

And also they give it that lovely earthy flavour as well.

Yeah. The Cumbrians, being great adventurers,

cooks and generous of spirit,

would have brought the dates back from our trade with the mysterious East.

Now let's put in the dates and the water and the bicarb.

Let's just throw those in.

Now the batter's virtually there.

Dave's just stirring all those lovely dates and date water in,

we've lined...

..a lovely baking dish with butter

and a little bit of baking parchment.

The thing is, the clue's in the title, it's got to be sticky.

That's why it's quite a loose mixture.

Try and get those dates so they're evenly distributed.

Pop that into a preheated oven, 180 degrees Celsius,

25-30 minutes until risen,

golden and just about springy.

So the toffee sauce.

It is simplicity itself.

Melt the butter.

We've got Demerara sugar.

Muscovado sugar.

I'm just going to put some cream in there now.

So then what you do, once all the sugars have dissolved and the butter's melted,

you continue to stir and then you just bring it to the boil

and you simmer it.

Now, there may be a temptation to stick your finger in it,

because it's glossy and lovely.

Don't, because it'll be incredibly hot. Now look at this.

This is what we're talking about for a simmer.

Just a couple of minutes like this.

And what will happen is those sugars will start to darken even more,

and it'll just make this beautiful, beautiful sauce.

Turn it off.

Leave it to cool.

Oi! In yonder oven, I smell a pud.

I'd better get it out before it's a dud.

Although it was very liquidy, it's really firmed up a treat.

-Lush.

-In fact, it's too firm.

We want it sticky.

Now, you could use a skewer, a piece of spaghetti,

but we find chopsticks is just the right bar for that thick toffee sauce

to go. I want reasonably...

Not too random, because every bit's

got to have the right amount of stick.

Ohhh...

So you just leave that to soak in. Leave it for a good few hours,

-just so that soaks in.

-Mm-hm.

And then reheat it, reheat the sauce, serve with a bit of cream,

job done.

-Oh, mate.

-That's lovely, isn't it?

-Oh, God.

-Oh.

-Oh, dear me.

It's one of those just great puddings, isn't it?

-It is, it is. But it's all about the dates, isn't it?

-Mm-hm.

Actually, do you know what? It is great.

Everybody after Christmas has a box of dates left there they don't know

-what to do with.

-That's a good idea, actually.

Just knock yourself up a sticky toffee pudding.

-I tell you what, this taste of Cumbria episode's doing well, isn't it?

-Aye.

-Brilliant.