EdwardIV

The history of York is the history of England ~ King George VI, 1923 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 He wasn't exaggerating. Romans, Vikings, Saxons and Normans have all left their mark here. The city's been a Roman capital, a Viking stronghold and the site of battles that shaped the fate of the whole nation. Nearly 2,000 years of history, layered street upon street and still standing today 💪

It's all yours bro no need to rushb 🐿️😀

Some people think I’m a big hefty chonky girl, but I’m only a tiny slip of a thing and I really need to eat more to bulk up. All food donations accepted. DON’T TELL MY MUMMY!

🇬🇧 From 1963 to 1987, a remarkable cat named Towser lived at the Glenturret whisky distillery near Crieff, Scotland. Towser was a long-haired tortoiseshell female who spent nearly 24 years protecting the distillery’s grain stores from mice. Her hunting skills were extraordinary. According to Guinness World Records, she caught an estimated 28,899 mice during her lifetime, averaging more than three mice every day. The remarkable figure was calculated from observations of her hunting activity rather than an exact count over the years. Towser became a legend at the distillery, where she had a warm place to sleep and spent her nights keeping rodents away from the grain used to make whisky. She died on March 20, 1987, just one month before her 24th birthday. To honor her extraordinary life, a bronze statue was erected outside the distillery’s visitor center. Decades after her death, Towser remains one of the most famous working cats in history, remembered as the world’s greatest mouser.

Not bad, less than two bob for a pint of bitter. 🍻 😀

I’ve seen reports about investigations into two different illegal activities this morning. My question is, do I ring the sun newspaper about these Teddy Bears setting up an illegal pub in my living room before I contact the authorities?

Clotted cream is the richest dairy product in the British kitchen, nearly two thirds fat, and it was invented as a way of keeping milk in a county with no ice. The method is older than anyone can trace. Fresh milk from the morning is left in a wide pan until the cream rises, then the whole pan is set over a very low fire or in a cooling bread oven for hours, never boiling, until a thick crust forms on top the colour of old gold. It cools overnight and the crust is lifted off with a skimmer. That crust is the cream, and the scalding is what kept it. Heated that way it lasted for days when fresh cream would have turned by teatime. Devon and Cornwall argued over it for centuries and still do. The Cornish got the legal protection in 1998, on condition that the milk is Cornish and the fat is at least fifty-five per cent, though the good stuff runs higher. The argument about whether the cream or the jam goes on the scone first has split the two counties for as long as there have been scones, and it is the only question in British food that people will genuinely fight over. If you grew up in the West Country it came in a cardboard tub with a crust you broke through with a knife, and it went on everything: the scone, the apple pie, the porridge, a spoon of it straight off the blade when nobody was looking. A pot sent by post to a relative in London was the standard Christmas present from Cornwall for a hundred years. It is milk with the water taken out and the fat left in, and it was the ordinary household food of the two poorest counties in England. The cream tea is now a treat you drive to and photograph. In 1930 it was what a dairy farmer's wife did with Tuesday's milk, and the fat was the whole point of doing it.

Working in the library and someone has requested this book about Elizabeth Woodville and the charismatic warrior king! @EdwardIVGhost

The Black Bull, Otley, #Yorkshire 🍻 The oldest pub in Otley. Dating from the 16th-Century. History abounds in the pub with low ceilings, oak beams and stone flagged floor. famously “drunk dry” by Oliver Cromwell’s troops before the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644.

Yorkshire roses are sturdy.

The British sausage is called a banger because in the First World War it was so full of water that it exploded in the pan, and the one that never did was the one from Cumberland. Before the war a butcher's sausage was pork, fat, salt, pepper and a little rusk to hold it, and it fried. During the war, with meat rationed, the makers filled the skins with water, scraps and whatever cereal they could get, and the water turned to steam in the hot fat and burst the casing. Soldiers named it, and the name stuck to the whole family for a hundred years. The Cumberland sausage stood apart. Up in the Lake District it was made by the yard, coiled flat into a wheel rather than twisted into links, from coarsely chopped pork rather than minced slurry, heavily peppered, with no colouring and almost no filler. A proper one is more than 90% meat. The spice came in through Whitehaven, which was trading with the Indies, and the pork came from the pigs every Cumbrian farmhouse kept. You bought it by length, not by number. If you grew up in the north it was the Sunday breakfast, a whole coil in the pan, cut into quarters at the table, with the fat spitting round it. Fried in lard, because that is what was in the pan. In 2011 the name was protected by law. It has to be made in Cumbria, in the coil, with at least 80% meat, and the cheap imitations with a quarter of the pig and three quarters of the water had to drop the name. The sausage in a supermarket pack is what the war taught the trade: fill the skin with water and sell the skin. The one in the coil is what a sausage was before anyone had to. They told you sausages were bad for you. They meant the water.

A Melton Mowbray pork pie is pork, wrapped in pork fat, sealed with pork jelly. It was built to survive a day in the coat pocket of a man on a galloping horse. The pastry is like no other. You boil water with a block of lard until it melts, pour it hot into the flour, and work it while it is still warm. The result can be raised by hand into a tall case that will stand up on its own. It bakes as hard as a tin. The filling is fresh pork, chopped with a knife, with nothing added but salt and pepper. It cooks grey, the colour of a roast, and a real one is never pink. Then comes the clever part. As the meat cooks it shrinks away from the crust and leaves a gap. So when the pie comes out of the oven, hot stock made from boiled trotters is poured in through a hole in the lid. It sets into a jelly that fills every space and shuts out the air. That is what makes the pie keep. It was the food of the hunting field. The grooms and riders of Leicestershire needed something that would not fall apart at a fence, and from the 1830s Melton was sending them to London by stagecoach. And the pork was there for a reason. The same countryside makes Stilton. Cheesemaking leaves gallons of whey, and whey fattens pigs. The cheese fed the pig, and the pig became the pie. The recipe has been protected by law since 2009. Every part of it breaks a modern rule. It is also a complete meal you can eat with one hand, that needs no fridge and no packaging, and they solved it 200 years ago with a pig.

That’s some set of pipes, Carlisle Cathedral.