Stotties, liver and pease pudding- the Hairy Bikers on why Northern food is back on the menu
Forget petrol, the Ribble Valley’s Parkers Arms has been experiencing a run on its infamous curried mutton pies since the Hairy Bikers tucked into one on screen on Thursday night. “#Panicbuying!” tweeted one happy luncher on Friday. “Blimey so now I know the power of TV,” replied chef Stosie Madi after they had sold out again on Sunday night. “They came from Leeds, Liverpool, North Wales... we cannot keep up with pie demand but we will try our best.”
The Hairy Bikers’ latest eight-part series, which started in Lancashire on Thursday, sees the hirsute pair – Dave Myers, 64, and Si King, 55 – return to their roots for a road trip across the North on two Triumph motorcycles. Myers describes the series as a “love letter to ourselves” – but also to the wonders of northern gastronomy, which now appears to be outpacing the South.
Largely, the bikers say this is down to the quality of produce – the aforementioned pie and, crucially, its lamb-fat pastry is made from hogget (a lamb in its second spring or summer) sourced from the Duchy of Lancaster’s Whitewell Estate down the road – and the buzz of the multicultural communities living there. Another producer they visit is Razan Alsous, a Syrian refugee and mother-of-three, now creating an award-winning halloumi-style cheese in the mill town of Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire.
Myers, who splits his time between Kent and France, is even contemplating a move back up himself. “It was nice to find my roots,” he says. “I felt slightly homesick for the North.”
The pair were working in TV – Myers in make-up and prosthetics and King in production – when they first met on the set of a Catherine Cookson drama in 1992 and immediately hit it off. After bonding over a shared love of motorcycles and cooking, they created the travelogue series which first appeared on our screens in 2004, going on to spawn dozens of recipe books and even earning Myers a spot on Strictly in 2013.
In a piece of PR the BBC couldn’t have timed better if it had tried, last week’s royal documentary tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh the Countess of Wessex revealed he counted the pair as his favourite celebrity chefs (and Prince William recalled that family lunches involved him inducing the grandchildren to squirt mustard on the ceiling).
News of their unofficial royal patronage was, King admits, not entirely out of the blue. A decade or so ago they filmed a programme with the Duchess of Cornwall in which it was let slip that the Duke was a fan. According to Myers, their shows are particularly popular in prisons, too. “To go from somebody who has been buying a pasty in Greggs to Buckingham Palace is not a bad demographic for two blokes who just want to cook,” he says.
The launch of the series also coincided with tabloid headlines that King, who is divorced from his first wife with whom he had three children, has split up with his Australian fiancée Michele Cranston.
“It’s got nothing to do with my professional life and nothing to do with anybody else, but you had to ask,” he says, more gently than it sounds, when I inquire about it.
King has previously spoken about the strain their extensive work and travel schedule puts on family life. Certainly the bikers are well-used to racking up road and air miles. This week Myers is on holiday with his wife Lili in her native Romania. Meanwhile King is enjoying a family reunion with his brother and sister who live in Italy.
Their decision to film a series in the North was not one borne out of Covid travel restrictions (the pair point out they signed the contract in December 2019) but rather reconnecting with the food they grew up with and which in recent years has enjoyed something of a culinary boom.
In the annual National Restaurant Awards announced in August, four out of five of the UK’s best restaurants are now in northern England, with 16 in the top 40 – double the number in 2019 when the poll was last held.
There were few such accolades on offer when Myers was growing up in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, where his father worked as a foreman in a paper mill and his mother as a shipyard crane operator. When he was eight his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and ended up confined to a wheelchair. Myers recalls a period of about three years when their kitchen staples were tinned mince, mashed potato and marrowfat peas – on one occasion his father mixed them all together and claimed to have created a risotto.
An only child, from the age of 12 he took over responsibility for the weekly shop and still recalls his parents’ horror when he returned triumphant one day with a new-fangled frozen supermarket pizza. When Myers was 17 his father suffered a debilitating stroke. As a full-time carer he also became responsible for all the cooking – sometimes using fillets of fresh plaice he caught himself and Morecambe Bay shrimp bought by the pint (a delicacy they rediscover in the new series).
Myers has also carried other childhood favourites into adult life. His father’s roast chicken (before he grew too frail to cook), plates of liver, bacon and onion, while tinned tomatoes on toast topped with a couple of crispy rashers remains his go-to hangover cure.
Growing up in the north-east pit village of Kibblesworth (the area where he still lives today) Si King was exposed to rather more exotic food due to his father’s job overseas. During the Second World War he served in the Arctic Convoys and would often bring back ingredients from his travels with the Royal Navy – such as lemongrass and star anise from the Far East – to spice up their home cooking.
King talks of the importance of passing down recipes from one generation to the next. Last week, a malt loaf caused general bafflement among the millennial Bake Off contestants, but King insists it is down to parents to expose their children to traditional staples. He points out his three sons, aged between 21 and 32, are devotees of the humble malt loaf.
“You can’t blame the millennials if nobody is passing that flavour on to them,” he says. “It’s not their fault, it’s ours.”
As well as championing northern food, both bikers hope that the series will contest stereotypes. Speaking of which, King and Myers are withering of the Government’s ongoing attempts to “level up” the North.
“It just rhetoric, nothing more, and there is no meaning in it,” King says. “In the North East we’ve looked after ourselves for years because we are too far from Westminster for anybody to care.” He feels the Government’s efforts to appeal to new voters in the North are “patronising” and “all a bit cloth cap and whippet”.
King would prefer to see more celebration of the North and its cuisine. “The great thing about the UK is we do have our own culture and it’s about time we recognised and embraced it.”
Food, he says, is a huge part of exploring our regional identities. One of his favourite recipes in the new series is one native to his own North East: stotties – traditional bread cakes – with pease pudding and hunks of ham smeared with a thick layer of English mustard.
No doubt Prince Philip would have approved of such a hearty dish, but with one key difference – “we kept all the mustard in the sandwich,” King says.
The Hairy Bikers Go North continues on BBC Two on Thursday at 8pm
