4 June 2025

True “Yorkshire tea” is the ultimate in processed food

An exhibition in Ryedale shows just how much skill and graft goes into making a meal.

Dorothy Hartley opens her monumental Food in England by recalling the kitchens of her Yorkshire childhood – and the oatcakes, hot buttered toast, beef sandwiches and Yorkshire puddings made within. One particularly outstanding spread inspires this exquisitely Proustian sentence: “The Craven Heifer Inn served a massive Yorkshire tea with ham, game pies, apple pies, parkin and cheese, hot teacakes, jam and honey and black treacle, and tea.” It conjures not just the craft of an inn kitchen, but the old magic of processing food to help it keep: pickling or salting, fermenting, preserving with sugar, baking with black treacle (which kept gingerbreads and parkins moist for days).

Processes that change the taste and texture of food, or those that keep it, are often ancient and regionally specific. Adding the name of a place changes the way we think about smoked, salted or acid-pickled fish, territorial cheese, fermented dairy foods, something sweet and baked. Even if you’ve never tasted a butcher-made York ham, Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese or Grasmere gingerbread, it obviously won’t taste anything like those packets of re-formed slices of meat, a plastic-wrapped cheese, or a snappy little ginger biscuit.

Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian professor of nutrition and public health, first recognised and named the problem of ultra-processing in food by setting out to discover why obesity rates in Brazil were rising even as sugar sales were falling. He came to think that a bag of sugar in a kitchen was a sign of good health, as it meant people were cooking for themselves. His four “Nova” categories distinguish food not according to the customary levels of fat, salt and sugar, but by levels of processing. The first two encompass unprocessed or minimally processed foods; the third acknowledges that factories can also use mechanised versions of long-established techniques, such as drying, canning, freezing. These are not the same as the industrial contortions, extrusions and additions of the fourth category, UPF. The food industry wants us to think that Nova is problematic: too simple, too negative. Having spent time in an ordinary kitchen, these categories feel quite intuitive to me, as they would to anybody who has worked on a farm, in a smokery, a brewery, a dairy or a bakery.

Processing food takes effort. “Making a Meal of It”, an exhibition at the Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire, shows just how much skill and graft went into turning rye, oats and, in later centuries, wheat, into bread – as well as barley into beer, pigs into hams, combs into honey and fruit into jams and marmalades. The dairy was where women, cool and clean without the disruption of men, made cream, butter and cheese from milk. York ham, traditionally dry cured over months, was so renowned that, like cheddar, it was copied (to a lower standard) all over the world. From the 17th century, gingerbread moulding, cake-baking and, eventually, tea-drinking joined the list of Yorkshire’s famed skills.

It is no coincidence that these foods sound like just the thing for Dorothy Hartley’s magnificent Yorkshire tea. “Tea” in the north (and other parts of the country) is still the name for an early-evening meal that others call dinner. For farm and factory workers, who might only have a fire and kettle, the brew transformed a cold meal of bread, cheese or bacon into a hot one. Add in gingerbread, cakes and pies, and it is easy to see why it was talent-spotted by the aristocratic culinary writers of the 1930s, who distinguished “high tea” eaten sitting up at a table from the armchair “tea” taken mid afternoon. Lady Troubridge’s Etiquette and Entertaining decides that high tea could be made acceptable in one’s weekend cottage, so long as it was done with a knowing embrace of “farmhouse fashion”: butter in an earthenware crock, a pot of jam, a big brown teapot and no genteel china.

Whatever “Yorkshire tea” suggests today, it’s worth seeking it out in its full historical glory: a hearty, hard-won gastronomic pleasure.

Pen Vogler is talking about “The Politics of Pudding: The Past, Present and Future of Yorkshire Food” at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole at 2pm on 12 July