Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire

by Helen Gaffney

These three counties are part of a group known as the ‘Home Counties’. They are largely affluent areas and are home to many commuters to London.

The name of Buckinghamshire means ‘the farm of Bucca's people’. It was first recorded in 1016 as Buccinghamscir. Stretching from the London outskirts towards the Midlands, Buckinghamshire is home to the Chiltern Hills as well as the meandering River Thames and the rolling acres of the Aylesbury Vale, which is some fifty miles long but just ten miles wide at its narrowest point. Country walks run between its picturesque villages with a host of welcoming pubs, whilst lovers of historic houses are spoilt for choice between the Rothschild's magnificent Waddesdon Manor and the stunning Cliveden. The county is home to the pretty market towns of Marlow, Amersham and Buckingham as well as the rich literary heritage of writers such as John Milton, TS Eliot and Mary Shelley.

Bedfordshire is an area of diverse attractions ranging from stately homes and sleepy country villages to major tourist attractions like Whipsnade Zoo and bustling towns. Among the many attractions are the marvellous stately homes of Woburn Abbey and Wrest Park. These contain treasure troves of history and are both set in beautiful parklands; the Abbey was built on the site of a Cistercian monastery, founded in 1145, and has been the home of the Dukes of Bedford for 350 years. Fine buildings and the Great Ouse river dominate the county town of Bedford, whose prosperity dates from the late 17th century when the town became an important distribution point for goods up and down the Great Ouse. Cheap public school education became widely available in the late nineteenth century, attracting many new residents and this educational tradition is still strong today. Bedford is also synonymous with John Bunyan. The name is from the Anglo-Saxon Bed's Ford, or river crossing, and the name was first recorded in 1011 as Bedanfordscir.

Archaeological relics date Hertfordshire's first residents back to the early Stone Age, although it was the Romans that later left a more lasting impression. Roman occupation ended in the fifth century followed by the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. The new rulers founded their own towns such as Hertford, which was built as a fortress, and the county became a frontier in the struggle against the Danes. The Normans, creators of the Domesday Book, were the next settlers in the county leaving their mark in a series of castles such as those at Hertford, Bishop's Stortford and Berkhamsted. Over the next few centuries, proximity to London made the county a popular retreat for the nobility, whose grand homes often welcomed visiting royalty. The industrial revolution had a significant impact on the county, which saw a spectacular growth of population. It was in response to this that Victorian pioneer Ebenezer Howard came up with his plan for a Garden City and in 1903 Letchworth was chosen as the first site for this experiment in town planning. Pressure for space continued and in 1946 the New Towns Act was passed. Stevenage was the first of these New Towns, planned to combine residential, shopping, industrial and leisure areas in discrete self-contained ‘neighbourhood communities’.

What, then, do people eat and drink in this heartland of England? Regional foods, perhaps, are not so immediately apparent here, amidst the magpie affluence, as they are in more rural areas or regions with hard-working roots - the true foods of the country are often born from the land itself or out of necessity. Nevertheless, certain specialities are associated with the region.

Aylesbury Duck is one of the most famous dishes, often served simply roasted with an orange or apple sauce. The country around Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire is noted for its large number of duck ponds with the Aylesbury duck distinguished by its pure white plumage, bright orange feet and legs and flesh-coloured bill. Locals used to bring their ducks to the town market to sell them but the Aylesbury duck is no longer produced for the table on any scale. Most commercial duck breeders use hybrids developed from the Peking Duck. However, there is the Aylesbury Club, a private society formed to preserve the local tradition of eating duck!

It is not clear exactly how the Aylesbury duck evolved. Before the eighteenth century few specific breeds of any domesticated animal are named and ducks kept for domestic consumption on farms, which were known as the Common Duck, would have been little removed from the wild Mallard. These ducks ranged in colour from brown and grey to black, but occasionally white birds occurred as they did in the wild. By the eighteenth century selected breeding of the common duck gave rise to a white domestic duck that was generally termed the ‘English White’ to distinguish it from the coloured strains. The preference of local breeders for pure white plumage was probably due to the knowledge that the dealers, who came from the East End of London, paid higher prices for pure white feathers as these found a ready market abroad where they were popular as quilt-filling. Certainly great trouble was taken to keep the ducks' feathers white by keeping them away from strong sunlight, dirty water and iron-rich soils. Another reason was that when plucked, the almost-albino birds had a pink and white skin which contrasted strongly with the yellow appearance of coloured birds and was probably more attractive to the buyer.

The Bedfordshire Clanger is a hefty suet pastry with a savoury filling at one end and a sweet one at the other, thus giving farm labourers a complete meal in one. However, this does not seem to have been the original form. Clangers were once a boiled suet roll, like a plum duff or roly-poly. The roll contained a meat filling and the crust itself was studded with fruit, again a complete meal in one. Compilations of English country recipes show them to have been plain, substantial food for farm labourers and other manual workers. Suet pastry enclosed a filling that varied with the affluence of the family involved. The poor used bacon, which was the only meat that was readily available. Richer families used good steak or pork.

Similar dishes were made in other parts of eastern central England such as a bacon clanger, filled with bacon, sage and onion, from the Thames valley. A similar dish was known in Leicestershire as a Quorn bacon roll. No-one has offered a derivation of clanger. ‘Clang’ may be a Northamptonshire dialect word meaning ‘to eat voraciously’. The Bedfordshire Clanger may have developed in response to local employment patterns. Many women were employed in the straw-hat industry and the clanger, boiling slowly for hours unattended, was a complete hot meal for those arriving home from work. Clangers are now made because there is still a local taste for them and there are even clanger-eating contests at local fairs and festivities. However, clangers have evolved into a baked dish; old recipes sometimes called for boiled rolls to be dried in a low oven before consumption and this reflects the evolution of British cooking methods - away from long boiling to dry baking, more convenient once domestic gas or electric cookers became universally available.

One peculiarly English institution is the Pancake race and the oldest of these has been held at Olney in Buckinghamshire, in most years since 1445. Townsfolk gather to see the original and unique Olney Pancake Race which is now world famous. Traffic stops while the competitors make their 415 yard dash from the Bull Hotel (an old coaching inn) to the parish church of St Peter and St Paul. No one is quite certain how the world famous Pancake Race at Olney originated. One story tells us of a harassed housewife, hearing the shriving (confessional) bell, dashing off to the church still clutching her frying pan containing a pancake. Another that the gift of pancakes may have been a form of bribe to the Ringer, or Sexton, that he might ring the bell sooner; for the ringing of the Church bell was the signal for the beginning of the day's holiday and enjoyment, no less than to summon the people to the shriving service at which they would be shriven of their sins before the long Lenten fast.

Buckinghamshire is also home to the Chiltern Brewery, founded in 1980. It was the first new Brewery in Buckinghamshire in over a century and was launched to reintroduce the original concept of traditional local beers for local people. Marylebone Station in London was the first of five British Rail ‘Chiltern Line’ stations to stock the Chiltern Brewery beers. It is now, by some margin, the oldest working brewery in Buckinghamshire. Hertfordshire too was a major centre for brewing thanks to the ample supplies of good quality water and malting barley in the Lea valley plus the proximity of the large market in London. Indeed, for a time in the nineteenth century the scale of malting and brewing in eastern Hertfordshire made it one of the largest centres of the industry in western Europe.

Hertfordshire has it own natural spring water, Hadham Water, which is bottled at source at the heart of the Ash Valley and purified by filtration through 500 feet of chalky bedrock to give an excellent-tasting, crisp, pure, spring water. The Childwickbury Estate near St Albans produces two fine local goats' cheeses - one is a fresh, mild cheese which is particularly good for cooking and is ideal for children with cows milk allergies; the second is a Camembert-style cheese. And, finally, D. White's is a butcher that produces the famous Braughing sausage. It is said to be a unique combination of quality pork blended with traditional ingredients into hand- linked natural casings. More than 30,000 sausages are made and sold every week!

As we can see, there is much more to this English heartland than one might at first suspect.