Cumbria on a Plate
‘Cheese couldn’t be simpler,’ says Carolyn Fairbairn at the Thornby Moor Dairy near Carlisle. ‘This was grass yesterday, it’s milk today and you can eat it tomorrow. And with a bit of luck we’ll be paid by the end of the month.’
Carolyn is giving us a guided tour of her cheese farm, organised for us by Annette Gibbons. Annette lives near Maryport in Cumbria, and as a local cookery teacher and celebrity chef, with her own series on Border TV called Home Grown, she knows most of Cumbria’s specialist food producers. She decided to share her secrets with visitors, and now runs Cumbria on a Plate tours, taking a maximum of six people out for the day to visit sheep farmers, shrimp fishers, bakers, millers, chocolate makers and cheese makers, with a top-notch two-course lunch the filling in the day’s sandwich.
‘I decided to limit it to six people,’ Annette says, ‘because if you have more than that, you lose the intimacy. Also some of the places we visit don’t normally do group tours, like the butter-farm we’re visiting first where we all have to squeeze into the kitchen, and we’ll have scones and coffee waiting for us.’
Scones? I’ve scarcely finished my full English breakfast and here we are in Sue Forrester’s kitchen watching her make creamy butter and being offered her mouthwatering buttermilk scones, topped with her own Cumberland rum butter. And if the butter business ever fails, she could make a good living as a stand-up comedian. Sue regales us with limericks and jokes as she explains how she began butter-making when she and her husband produced more milk than they should have.
‘We were over-quota,’ she says. ‘That meant we were going to be paid 16p a litre for our milk, but fined 28p a litre for producing too much. And we had 14,000 litres too much! Does that make sense to you? Right, I says to my husband, we’re making butter.’
We learn a lot about food production on our day out, some of it unrepeatable. We learn that Danish bacon is mostly English, and that some Cumbrian cattle spend the last week of their lives in Scotland so they can be sold in the supermarkets as prime Scottish beef.
At our next stop with Carolyn Fairbairn, she confirms that these days it’s more important than ever that we know where our food comes from. At Carolyn’s dairy we know because we’ve just seen her making it. And at our lunch stop at Hornby Hall, we know that the venison on our plates comes from the estate, and even the apricots in the apricot mousse.
We’ve hardly washed down the last of the wine when we’re away to The Old Smokehouse at Brougham Castle, and then it’s The Watermill in Little Salkeld for a tour of the mill, a chance to buy some flour and, oh dear, home-made flapjack.
Back at the hotel that night, exhausted but exhilarated, we opt for the light version of the four-course menu. ‘Would you like some bread,’ the waitress asks. ‘There’s honey bread, mustard and garlic bread, Cumbrian sausage bread…’ Oh dear.
