The geography lesson you can eat: around the UK in 19 local dishes

Photographs by Ellis Parrinder

Food styling by Sarah Hardy

Last summer, on Yorkshire Day (1 August), 100 volunteers from Hull disembarked in London to hand out 5,000 pots of American Chip Spice. How this promotion of tourism in East Yorkshire was received remains to be seen. But that choice of calling card, chip spice, was never in doubt.

As with Sheffield’s fondness for the Worcestershire-sauce-adjacent condiment Henderson’s Relish, Hull’s love of chip spice is a distinctive source of much civic pride. Imagine a “more flavoursome oniony, garlicky, paprika-y” take on salt, says Abi Bell, a manager at Hey! Volunteering, who helped coordinate the London event. According to Bell the spice, aka “Hull dust”, is “standard” in local takeaways. “Once you’ve tried it,” she says. “I honestly don’t think you would eat chips without it.”

This love affair started at Yankee Burger, a US-diner-inspired restaurant in Hull, which, in the 1980s, began using paprika-based seasoning on its fries. It was made by a local supplier catering to many of the city’s chip shops and whose owners, Rod and Brenda Wilson, had tasted similar seasonings travelling in North America – hence the name, American Chip Spice.

“It’s not really known outside the area,” says Bell, although that’s beginning to change. Now manufactured by the Wilsons’ son, Edward (alongside his Wilson’s Seasonings business in Hertfordshire), American Chip Spice is sold nationally in Heron and B&M Express stores, as well as Asda and Morrison’s in Yorkshire. Interest is growing, such that Wilson recently tripled the amount of chip spice he can produce annually, to 2.5m pots a year.

Arguably, enlivening chips with a paprika-based seasoning is a British food subculture waiting to explode. You can buy paprika “chip seasoning” from Schwartz and Sainsbury’s, and similar “red salts” (some with added chilli), are a cult condiment in Lancashire and Merseyside takeaways.

You could, when talking about pizza crunch (slices or halves of readymade pizza, battered on the toppings side, then deep fried), invoke its Neapolitan antecedent, pizza fritta. But is there any need to justify it that way?

Anthony Bourdain nailed it during an early visit to Glasgow for his TV series A Cook’s Tour. “Here’s a problem: this is a hideous and horrible idea, but I could eat this. If I was drunk enough, I would eat this and like it.” Case closed.

Pride of the city’s post-pub takeaway scene: spiced potato chunks. Normally coated in seasoned batter, fried (occasionally, roasted), and served with mayo, gravy, curry sauce or such. Seasonings vary but are generally on a Cajun-slash-southern fried chicken tip. This distant cousin of the Bombay potato might also be spotted in Cambridgeshire and Essex.

There was much confusion this April when on the Waitrose Dish podcast pop star Jade Thirlwall baffled hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett with her mention of pease pudding on a ham sandwich. “It’s a northern thing,” said the South Shields-born, ex-Little Mix singer of this regional spread-cum-dip. Split peas are cooked in stock with herbs, seasonings and vegetables, then blitzed into a smooth paste, known as “Geordie hummus”.

That classic combination, ham and pease pudding on a stottie (north-east England’s floury bread roll), has had its setbacks. Newcastle-based bakery chain Gregg’s discontinued its version in 2016. But the sandwich has featured at Hairy Biker Si King’s Sunderland takeaway Propa (in April’s OFM, King chose pease pudding as his ‘secret ingredient’), and pease pudding travels among chefs. In Manchester, Shaun Moffat’s Winsome restaurant has used it as a polenta-like bed for a mushroom dish. Moffat loves how it “delivers comfort and depth to whatever it’s served with”.

Popular in the Black Country, these vivid chips are dipped in turmeric- or paprika-seasoned batter before frying to produce the crunch of a triple-cooked chip with built-in scraps in every bite. “It’s extra texture, extra flavour,” enthuses chef Dan Lee, owner of Birmingham street food brand Hawker Dan.

A classic on Caroline Street, aka Chippy Lane, this late-night favourite has inspired a meal kit at hip Cardiff ramen kitchen Matsudai Ramen (the Chippy Lane mazesoba) and enjoyed a namecheck in the Welsh secretary Jo Stevens’s maiden speech to parliament. Caroline Street, Stevens explained, is where “city-centre revellers enjoy our special Welsh delicacy of chicken curry, half ’n’ half”.

Cardiff’s shredded chicken with half-rice and half-chips, and topped with curry sauce is not the only dish or “serve” to become a notable feature of a city’s life. In Manchester, the Northern Quarter cafes still serving rice ’n’ three (rice and three curries) are beloved institutions. Decades ago, such cafes fed South Asian workers in the area’s thriving garment industry. Now those warehouses are mostly apartments, and cafes such as This & That or Yadgar serve a broader clientele of long-term regulars, city-centre residents, students, office workers and tourists, all looking for an affordable, tasty feed.

Fittingly, the scotch egg’s finest makeover started in a pub. In 2009, Ben Holden was in Manchester’s Castle Hotel, snacking on a pickled egg, crisps and a scotch egg, when the then web designer and keen cook was inspired to combine those textures and flavours in one item, the Manchester egg: pickled egg centre, black pudding wrap, panko crumb shell. This brainwave still resonates. For example, Elnecot restaurant serves a version, as did Hawksmoor during this year’s 10th birthday celebrations for its Manchester branch.

Not just for tourists, this sweet tea loaf, a “thing” commercially since the early 1900s, is still present in shops, bakeries and on cafe menus, served toasted with butter and/or cheese. Warning: does not contain plums. “Plum” is a historic catch-all term for dried fruit.

Famously, in Wigan, pie is life: “Our DNA, our heritage, our birthright,” as David Barnett described it in the Guardian in 2017. Equally famously, this is a town with a fondness for sandwiching a peppery meat ’n’ potato pie in a buttered barm cake (bread roll), when visiting local bakeries, such as Galloway’s.

But the pie barm, or “Wigan kebab”, is not the only such snack in Lancashire. It has a creative rival: Bolton’s pasty barm. Said to have emerged independently in the 1950s among schoolkids looking for a filling lunch, the pasty barm remains popular enough that pasty-maker Carrs can still be found extolling this “famous Bolton delicacy” on social media. In 2022, the restaurant chain Yo! Sushi created its own pasty barm riff, a gyoza barm, to launch a new Bolton branch.

Regardless of which came first, or, even, which is better, both barm-based schools, pie and pasty, have contributed significantly to that pantheon of British double-carb delights, one that ranges from chip butties to Scotland’s macaroni (cheese) pies.

Think of the classic fishcake: mashed potato, salmon, dill, breadcrumbed, pan-fried. Now imagine this instead: two slices of potato sandwiching a piece of fish, battered and deep-fried. “Batter, tatter, fish, tatter, batter,” as Sheffield food writer Martin Dawes describes it.

Dawes suggests Yorkshire fishcakes were, if not created in Sheffield (their origin story seems lost to history), once so associated with it that “Sheffield fishcake” was widely used to identify them, before “Yorkshire fishcake” took hold in a county “reluctant to give credit to anything from Sheffield”. In the Steel City (where breaded fishcakes are known as rissoles), chippie Two Steps does a notably good Sheffield fishcake.

The end-terrace, hole-in-the-wall kitchens that once kept Stoke-on-Trent and surrounding Potteries towns in hot oatcakes are gone; the last closed in 2012. But the “Tunstall tortilla” – a griddle-cooked, yeasted oatmeal and white flour pancake; bacon and cheese is one classic filling – are still widely available in shops and at specialist bakeries, such as Oatbakers, High Lane Oatcakes or Mellors.

Best eaten when a wintry wind is whipping off the Irish Sea, this flexible stew is a legacy of Liverpool’s maritime past. Made with beef and/or lamb (there is also a thrifty meat-free version known as blind scouse), it evolved after 18th-century exposure to lobscouse, a kind of stew eaten by northern European sailors.

The dish (hence the name “scousers”) is still widely available. “Liverpool Cathedral’s is the best hands down,” says Liverpudlian chef Sam Grainger, referring to the beef scouse at the Welsford Bistro, housed in the cathedral. It is served with homemade focaccia, vastly preferable to the hardtack biscuits that bulked out scouse in the 1700s.

Let the embarrassment begin as, “Result! We’re getting scallops for 80p a pop”, turns into the realisation that, “Hang on … is this just a large, battered slice of potato?” Yes. Yes, it is. And it’s delicious, if not seafood in any way. Scallops (sometimes spelled “scollops”) might also be spotted in Lancashire or as far south as Coventry. Also big in Australia.

Unbelievably, in Wigan, potato scallops have an entirely different name – smack – and are often eaten in a buttered bread roll, dressed with salt, vinegar and pea wet, which is a little ladle of mushy peas that is more cooking juice than marrowfat peas. “In Wigan, it’s as good as gravy,” as staff at the Trawlerman chip shop told the website Joe.

In 1970s South Yorkshire, says the acclaimed northern pop artist Pete McKee, tom, or tom dip, “was part of the DNA of being a Sheffielder”.

Where other cities had embraced tomato ketchup on their breakfast sandwiches (“I wouldn’t go near that stuff,” insists McKee), Sheffield moistened its breadcakes by briefly dipping one of the unbuttered halves, cut side down in a pan of hot tinned tomatoes to help create a saus-and-tom or BEST (bacon, egg, sausage, tomato) sandwich.

In 2017, food writer Martin Dawes was asking whether it was “last rites for the tom dip”. But plenty of Sheffield sandwich shops and traditional cafes still do it: McKee likes Spoilt For Choice on Ecclesall Road. Online cameos for tom dip (see @biggaboysfoodreviews on the Steel Inn Café) also suggest there is life yet in what McKee describes as a “hallowed combination. The tinned tomato interacts with the salt of the bacon or sausages and brings another dimension to it.”

“It’s party, party, party! Everybody round my house for a parmo!” is how BBC radio commentator Ali Brownlee confirmed Middlesbrough FC’s place in the Uefa Cup Final in 2006. That phrase is now the name of a book, is splashed across an underpass that takes Middlesbrough fans to the Riverside Stadium, and encapsulates how central parmo is to many Teessiders.

A piece of flattened, breaded, deep-fried chicken (or pork) topped with bechamel and grilled cheddar, parmo is thought – as ever, there are competing claims – to have been created by a US navy chef, Nicos Harris. Injured in the second world war, Harris recuperated in Middlesbrough, settling locally and opening a restaurant, the American Grill, in 1958. There, presumably inspired by the Italian-American dish chicken parmesan, but dropping the tomato sauce, Harris created the escalope parmesan.

Fast forward 67 years and the parmo has mutated into Middlesbrough’s default post-pub, after-club feed. Served with chips, parmos now come topped not just with bechamel and cheese but everything from bolognese sauce or pepperoni to garlic mushrooms or chicken tikka. The parmo functions, says fan Max Halley, owner of London’s Max’s Sandwich Shop, like “a pizza made of meat”.

Already home to one baffling pastry item – the clanger, a pasty-like suet pastry pocket filled with half savoury meat and half jam – Bedfordshire has also given the world chocolate toothpaste.

Originating in local schools in the 1970s, this sugary, shortcrust chocolate tart – then served in squares topped with sprinkles and blobs of squirty cream – endures locally in many versions, from late-night takeaways to artisan bakeries.

At Bedford’s Fancy Bakery, owner Saffron Denton has jazzed up the chocolate toothpaste recipe: making good pastry for large, circular tart cases and, for the filling, creaming sugar with butter not margarine, before adding quality cocoa and the dessert’s trademark milk powder, then topping it with whipped cream. But this is not one of Fancy Bakery’s silky ganache-style tarts. Instead, Denton explains, her chocolate toothpaste (available on Saturdays) has the authentic slight “grittiness and glueyness” that presumably inspired its name: “I make it as it should be made. People go mad for it.”

From laverbread (boiled and pureed seaweed  – “Welshman’s caviar” to actor Richard Burton) to Caerphilly cheese and leek Glamorgan sausages, Wales has a diverse range of historic food items that survive, and even thrive, everywhere from Michelin-starred kitchens to market stalls. Welsh cakes, the currant-studded, sugar-dusted, biscuit-scone hybrid, are a sweet entry-point. Eat them fresh off the griddle at Bakestones (Cardiff market) or Davies of Mumbles (Swansea indoor market).

Liverpool has a significant, well-established Chinese community and a high concentration of Chinese-owned chip shops, where a salt and pepper sensation was born.

It all started, possibly as early as the 1960s, with chips that were deep-fried then stir-fried again with green peppers, onions and various seasonings – treating them as Cantonese cooks might other fried foods. This is known collectively as “salt and pepper”. Commercial and bespoke salt and pepper spice blends vary, but typically include salt, white pepper, Chinese five spice, sugar, garlic and chilli, with MSG monosodium glutamate adding further savoury depth to some.

In recent years, that all-action flavour profile has swept Liverpool. Numerous foods (from fried chicken and doner meat to pork siu mai dumplings and tofu) are now given the salt and pepper treatment, with such dishes crossing over more generally. During spring test events at Everton’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, kiosk menus included a £12 salt and pepper chicken dish. “Salt and pepper is synonymous with Merseyside,” the stadium’s culinary director, Adam Bateman, told the Liverpool Echo.

“It’s unbelievable,” says Sam Grainger, co-owner of Liverpool restaurants Belzan and Madre. “No one just wants chips any more. It’s salt and pepper everything. It is delicious. I can’t deny it.”

A buttermilk bread, griddled and quartered into farls. Essential in a Northern Irish full breakfast (or Ulster fry), as are potato farls (aka potato cakes). Traditionally, both are served fried. Fun fact: historically, circular baking griddles were often made from the scrap metal leftover from creating portholes in Belfast’s shipyards.