SEED CAKE

I always think of my grandma as a little old lady carrying one of those once ubiquitous shopping bags that have long since gone out of fashion.

It was the kind of bag that was made of a kind of plastic that tried unsuccessfully imitate grainy leather and it was an unmistakable shade of beige long before any of us had heard of such a colour. It had two rolled and stitched handles reminiscent of a dog's collar, and a large zip that ran along the top.

Everybody's grandma had a bag like that. In those days, nobody thought it strange that she kept her handbag inside her shopping bag; it was no more strange than the fact that she kept her purse in her handbag.

Grandma always had something for somebody in that bag, she was one of those people who thought it unseemly, when making a visit, especially if unannounced, to arrive empty handed, or more correctly, with an empty shopping bag.

Grandma's arrival was always something of an occasion, even when it was just a flying visit on her way to somewhere else.

Grandma would come to see my mum more or less every day, but that did not mean that it was to be regarded as a casual visit, grandma never made a casual visit, she always did things with a purpose and a visit from grandma was something of a daily ritual, usually with tea and cakes. That is where the shopping bag comes in.

Mum made the tea (none of your tea bag muck in those days, real tea, Horniman's loose tea, sold by the quarter pound in yellow packets with a little 'dividend' stamp that you stuck into a book that could be redeemed when full) and grandma brought a cake.

One day, in the school holidays, grandma brought a 'seed cake.'

Grandma had searched high and low without success to find a baker's shop that sold a traditional Yorkshire style caraway seed cake, but one day her perseverance paid off and she came across a baker who had the expertise to make a 'seed cake' and it was duly bought, paid for and ensconced in grandma's shopping bag.

So, when grandma arrived for her afternoon tea, the seed cake was presented to the eagerly awaiting family.

Rover, the family dog, had an old, red and cream coloured 'leatherette' armchair (made of a material not exactly dissimilar to grandma's shopping bag) that was his bed, this was across the room from a stove that was never allowed to go out and heated the water and warmed up the kitchen a treat. When grandma came in through the door, my mum would get a large blanket to cover the chair so that grandma could sit in it without being covered with dog hair.

As soon as Rover saw grandma, he would slide out of the chair to greet her and, knowing his place in the pecking order, he would lie down on the floor at the side of the chair. He probably did this in anticipation of the dregs of grandma's cup of tea and the remnants of the cake that would inevitably came his way.

This particular day was the day that we were to be treated to the buttery delights of a traditional Yorkshire seed cake.

Yorkshire delicacies do not often 'travel' outside of the boundaries of that county, often they are not even appreciated as far away as over the Pennines to our house some twenty five miles away.

Yorkshire bacon used to be famous for its fat content of close on a hundred percent; it was served white, undercooked and totally inedible to all but a Yorkshireman.

When I was a child and relatives from Yorkshire descended, en masse, upon us my mum would send me to the shop for copious quantities of boiled ham for the visitors, but it was never going to be quite right for them. Yorkshire ham is pale coloured, wet and slightly slimy to the touch, but we served up a Lancashire ham, which in comparison is a dark pink meat. Just on the right side of dryness.

Seed cake is one of those Yorkshire treats that actually turn out to be a treat.

The old fashioned seed cake was marvellous with so much butter in it that you could get fat by looking at it and the taste was beyond compare.

So, grandma brought a seed cake, big moist and heavy it must have weighed her shopping bag down considerably, and the kitchen table almost groaned as it sat there on one of our biggest plates.

The tea was made and left to brew, the cake was cut into generous slices and the smaller children came in from playing in the garden, collected a piece of cake and retreated just as quickly.

Tea was served and the seed cake was superb, there really is nothing that compares to it these days when what passes for food is some factory made concoction that is manufactured as cheaply as possible to be sold at a premium price.

Grandma drank her tea, and ate her cake, save for a little of each that, as ever, she placed in the dog's bowls under the kitchen window. Glancing out, the sight that she was greeted with appalled her, for there sitting on the low wall that surrounded the lawn in the back garden was a row of children all picking the caraway seeds out of the cake and making two piles, one of seeds on the wall and another of cake crumbs that were being scrunched back together on their plates to be eaten in handfuls as an almost reformed lump of cake.

Grandma turned round to my mum and in an indignant voice she opined,

"You are not bringing these children up properly."