Clanger

Wherever we go I like to try local food, produce and recipes… Nothing is nicer than seeing something interesting on a menu, or something unusual on a market stall or on offer in a tea room. So on our recent visit to Bedfordshire, not only was I delighted by what a lovely county it is – well the part that we explored, but also was pleased to find the Wobbly Bottom Farm cheese stall in a small market, and some lovely bread from a baker’s just beside it, and some great looking vegetables as fresh as a fresh vegetable can be, but also to discover that there is a speciality called a clanger, a Bedfordshire clanger.

I won’t say where we saw the clangers because where they were was the most disappointing place during our visit, difficult and unfriendly staff, worse than mediocre coffee and a rather depressing environment… maybe they were having an off day… However, this was where we came across the clangers, and they did look very interesting and enticing.

Like a Cornish pasty, a clanger is a pastry item which must have originated as  lunch for a hungry worker; the pasty, or tiddy oggy, fed miners, the clanger no doubt fed agricultural labourers or brick yard workers. Clangers and pasties are a meal all in one; each of them feature a two-part pastry case with a savoury end and a sweet end. So a pasty might have swede, onion, potato and beef at one and jam at the other; a clanger might have steak and kidney and onion at one end and apple at the other. A pasty had baked short-crust pastry, a clanger had steamed suet crust pastry. There’s a difference in shape too; a pasty is a circle of pastry half filled and folded over and crimped along the edge, the clanger is a rectangle of pastry rolled up like a Swiss roll. I can’t find out how the Cornish pasty makers divided the sweet from savoury end, perhaps with a blob of pastry, perhaps they didn’t bother but the clanger has a strip of pastry put down the middle of the rectangle with sweet and savoury either side, so when it is rolled up it forms a suet barrier.

Lovely vegetables at the market stall in Biggleswade

I think I’ll try making a clanger, since I grew up in Cambridgeshire which is a neighbour of Bedfordshire, but I think I will stray away from the tradition and bake not steam my version. Now I must think about fillings…

If you want to look at Wobbly Bottom Farm…

http://www.wobblybottomfarm.co.uk/