Michelin & the Street: Yorkshire

YORKSHIRE Yes, we tried Yorkshire pudding. Yep, it’s good. Ate it at The Blue Lion in East Witton, where, apparently, Price Charles likes to sup when he’s around. Nice. The pub’s Sunday lunch is another great example of good cooking without the bells and whistles, though scanning the regular menu there was a bit too much fusion confusion for me, so I was more than happy that we were there for the roast beef or pork roast. The roast beef with Yorkshire pudding was just what you’d hope for, once again accompanied by amazing fresh horseradish (I’m going to plant some back home). And I was glad I’d married who I had, as he doesn’t like pork crackling so I got to eat it all off our shared pork plate.

So another great thing about Yorkshire is that it’s surrounded by the cheese lands, a mystical part of the UK that produces Lancashire, Wensleydale, Cheddar, Stilton… Wensleydale was the revelation this time. A crumbly white cheese not unlike a dry fetta, I adored it accompanied by fruitcake as is the Yorky way. The cheese is a perfect foil for the richness of the fruitcake; adding something slightly sharp and fresh to the otherwise very rich and musty cake. A disappointing thing however, was the tea: it’s all tea bags. I just hadn’t expected that. I’d thought that somewhere renowned for its afternoon teas would do it properly with leaf.

The Yorke Arms in Ramsgill is a Michelin-starred restaurant in an out-of-the-way village. Before lunch we enjoyed a bracing little walk around the ridges and through the meadows filled with new lambs – we two Australians lived a half-forgotten ancestry. We came in from the cold, took our borrowed Wellies off and partook of a sherry (figuratively speaking – we actually drank a glass of Chablis) in the drawing room. On second thoughts we probably weren’t living the shabby lives our particular relatives had lived in England, we were living the BBC on Sunday night ABC.

Best thing about my meal (aside from the delightful company of our Yorkshire Friends) was a perfect crayfish tail. I mean the kind that rock your world – a reminder that they’re brilliant when jumping-fresh and just-cooked, and a waste of money otherwise. The crayfish came with a Whitby crab salad – a refined, gentile dish of just the sort you’d expect in a fine, upstanding establishment! Dessert too was a cracker of rich cream and new berries – so much so that I forgot to photograph mine before I’d eaten it all.