Rejoice, today, the sixteenth of June is a great day for celebrations for all Yorkshire born and bred people, yet the vast multitude of the population will let today pass by without so much as a thought for the earth shattering event they should be celebrating!
Let me take you back in time to June 16th 1767. On this day Josiah Grimdyke was born in Barnsley. His widowed mother as a very interesting lady. She took in washing to make ends meet and used her washing rounds to “sus out” any washing lines which contained a good variety of clothes. These she would steal and put on her hand cart and sell them around the town. Sometimes even to the people she had stolen them from! (An ancient form of recycling?)
Now life was not easy for widow Grimdyke and when rent day came she would often pay the rent in the form of one or two of her famous pies, and this would keep the rent man at bay until he next called for the rent. However one day Widow Grimdyke had taken to her bed with what she called “One of her heads” (one wonders if she had a stock of heads!) and it so happened that it was this day that the rent man was due to call. There was no money available for the rent, so Widow Grimdyke called down to Josiah to make one of her famous pies to give to the rent man.
Josiah set too to make one of the pies, but being a pretty simple sort of lad he really didn’t have a clue on the intricacies of pie production. True, he had seen what his mother did, so without more ado he set out to emulate her. He put flour into a bowl to begin to mix the pastry, and added milk and eggs. It was here that he came to a grinding halt, and as he heard the rent mans rapidly approaching horse, clip clopping its way gradually down the street, he flung the mixture into a baking tin and put it in the oven.
He hastily mixed some gravy, because he knew his mother put gravy on her pies, and that the rent man loved his gravy. Eventually the rent man arrived, demanding “Where’s mi Money then?” Josiah flung open the oven door with a flourish and said “Maybe these will do instead!” He brought out the concoctions he had made. One was a lovely golden brown colour, and the other, being higher up in the oven was almost burnt to a crisp!
The rent man poured the gravy over the golden brown object and ate it and declared it was the best thing he’d ever tasted! Now it had begun to rain, and as the rent man had no hat he took the charred object and put it on his head!
So let’s celebrate Josiah Grimdyke, who invented the Yorkshire Pudding and the flat cap in one fell swoop.
No comments:
Post a Comment