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Our heritage
Every recipe carries the era and region it belongs to. Here is the whole library arranged by period.
1960s–80s icon
The Prawn Cocktail
Cold sweet prawns in Marie Rose sauce over shredded lettuce — the starter that built a thousand Berni Inns and is once again, defiantly, cool.
Serves 4 (starter)15 min totalEasy
1970s (Lake District)
Sticky Toffee Pudding
Britain’s most-ordered restaurant pudding: a dark, date-soft sponge flooded with hot toffee sauce. Invented in the Lake District, beloved everywhere custard is poured.
Serves 855 min totalEasy
1970s curry house
Chicken Tikka Masala
Officially “a true British national dish”: charred tikka chicken folded into a creamy tomato masala — the curry that out-sells roast dinners and tops UK recipe searches year after year.
Serves 470 min totalModerate
1970s pub board
Scampi & Chips
Sweet langoustine tails in golden breadcrumbs with chips, peas and tartare sauce — the great British pub seafood, unchanged and unimproved since 1974.
Serves 235 min totalEasy
1971 (The Hungry Monk)
Banoffee Pie
Invented in Sussex in 1971 and now a global classic: biscuit base, caramelised condensed milk, bananas and coffee-kissed cream.
Serves 8–1035 min totalEasy
1990s pub board
Hunter’s Chicken
Bacon-wrapped chicken baked in sticky barbecue sauce under a blanket of molten cheddar — the pub classic that has never once left Britain’s most-ordered list.
Serves 450 min totalEasy
Bonfire night tradition
Yorkshire Parkin
Sticky, dark ginger-and-oat cake that improves with a week in the tin — the edible essence of Bonfire Night in God’s own county.
Cuts into 12 squares75 min totalEasy
Cafe classic
Ham, Egg & Chips
Thick-cut carved ham, two fried eggs and proper chips — the transport-cafe Trinity, proof that three good things need no sauce at all.
Serves 230 min totalEasy
Chippy tradition
Proper Mushy Peas
Marrowfat peas soaked overnight and simmered to a soft, savoury green mush — the non-negotiable third element of fish and chips north of the Trent.
Serves 445 min totalEasy
Coaching inn
Beef in Ale Casserole
Slow-braised beef with carrots and pearl barley in dark ale — the sort of pot that has been bubbling beside inn fires for three centuries.
Serves 4–6180 min totalEasy
Dinner-party era
Chicken Liver Pâté
Silky, brandy-kissed pâté sealed under butter — the starter of a million 1970s dinner parties and still the best thing on toast before eight o’clock.
Serves 635 min totalModerate
Edwardian
Grilled Kippers with Butter
Oak-smoked Northumberland kippers grilled with a knob of butter — the breakfast of kings on the great Victorian and Edwardian tables.
Serves 213 min totalEasy
Smoked Haddock with a Poached Egg
Undyed smoked haddock poached in milk, finished with butter and crowned with a poached egg — the grand hotel breakfast that never went out of fashion.
Serves 217 min totalEasy
Edwardian grill room
Dover Sole Meunière
The prince of flatfish, floured and fried in foaming butter with lemon and parsley — a dish of three ingredients and absolute precision.
Serves 220 min totalModerate
Georgian
Black Pudding with a Fried Egg
Thick slices of proper Bury black pudding, fried until crisp-edged and crowned with a runny-yolked egg — a northern breakfast of champions.
Serves 217 min totalEasy
Bubble and Squeak
Yesterday’s roast potatoes and cabbage fried into a golden, crisp-edged cake — named for the sound it makes in the pan, and the best reason ever to cook too much on Sunday.
Serves 2–330 min totalEasy
Roast Beef & Yorkshire Pudding
The dish that built an empire: rose-pink sirloin with crackling-hot Yorkshires, roasties cooked in dripping, and gravy made in the roasting tin. England’s national dish and the most searched Sunday dinner in Britain.
Serves 6130 min totalInvolved
Roast Pork with Crackling & Apple Sauce
Shattering, bubbled crackling over sweet slow-roasted shoulder, with a sharp Bramley apple sauce to cut the richness. The trick is dry skin, salt, and courage.
Serves 6170 min totalModerate
Cottage Pie
The beefy sibling of the shepherd’s pie — humble cottage cooking from the days when potatoes were the poor man’s roof. Deeply savoury and endlessly comforting.
Serves 4–685 min totalModerate
Scotch Eggs
A soft-yolked egg wrapped in seasoned sausagemeat and fried to a deep amber — invented by Fortnum & Mason in 1738 and still the supreme picnic egg.
Makes 440 min totalModerate
Welsh Rarebit
The thinking person’s cheese on toast — a molten ale-and-mustard cheese sauce poured over toast and grilled until blistered. Add an egg and it becomes a buck rabbit.
Serves 220 min totalEasy
Morecambe Bay Potted Shrimps
Tiny brown shrimps sealed beneath spiced, clarified butter — the taste of Morecambe Bay, served with hot toast for the butter to melt into.
Serves 4 (starter)25 min totalEasy
Jellied Eels
The East End on a plate: poached eels set in their own savoury jelly, eaten cold with malt vinegar and white pepper beside a pie and mash shop counter.
Serves 440 min totalModerate
Rich Oxtail Soup
Dark, glossy and deeply beefy — oxtails braised until they surrender into a soup once prescribed for invalids and now ordered purely for pleasure.
Serves 4–6235 min totalModerate
Braised Red Cabbage with Apple
Slow-braised with Bramley apple, vinegar and spice — the sweet-sour purple anchor of every Christmas table and every good game dinner.
Serves 6–8105 min totalEasy
Piccalilli
Crunchy vegetables in a fierce mustard-and-turmeric pickle — England’s yellow answer to chutney, essential beside pork pies, ploughman’s and cold ham.
Makes 2 × 450g jars50 min totalModerate
Chelsea Buns
Sticky, glazed spirals of fruit and spice from the old Bun House on Pimlico Road — once so popular that George III queued for them.
Makes 950 min totalModerate
Proper English Trifle
Sherry-soaked sponge, fruit, custard and cream in a glass bowl — the towering architecture of every British celebration since your grandmother’s grandmother.
Serves 855 min totalModerate
Georgian (1737)
Perfect Yorkshire Puddings
Four ingredients, three rules: equal volumes, a screaming-hot tin, and never open the door. Crisp-crowned, soft-centred, as they have been since 1737.
Makes 830 min totalEasy
Georgian (1793)
Eccles Cakes
Flaky pastry parcels around buttery currants and brown sugar — sold in Eccles since 1793, banned by the Puritans, unstoppable ever since.
Makes 1048 min totalModerate
Georgian / PGI protected
Melton Mowbray Pork Pie
Hand-raised hot-water crust, uncured chopped pork, and a savoury jelly poured through the hole — the hunting-breakfast pie that defines an entire town.
Makes 1 large pie (serves 8)150 min totalInvolved
Georgian thrift
Bread & Butter Pudding
Buttered bread layered with sultanas and baked in nutmeg custard until the top crisps — thrift turned into one of the most comforting puddings in the canon.
Serves 660 min totalEasy
Industrial heritage
Staffordshire Oatcakes
The Potteries’ own pancake — soft, yeasty oatmeal rounds folded round melted cheese and bacon. An oatcake shop breakfast, recreated at home.
Makes 630 min totalModerate
Industrial revolution
Lancashire Hotpot
Mill-town fuel turned national treasure: neck of lamb stewed slowly under a crisp golden lid of sliced potatoes, with kidneys for tradition and pickled red cabbage alongside.
Serves 4175 min totalModerate
Medieval
Proper Porridge with Honey
Slow-cooked pinhead oatmeal porridge, creamy and rib-sticking, finished with good English honey and a splash of cold milk.
Serves 222 min totalEasy
Bread Sauce
One of England’s oldest sauces — milk steeped with clove-studded onion, thickened with soft breadcrumbs and enriched with butter. Inseparable from roast chicken and turkey.
Serves 635 min totalEasy
Egg Custard Tart
Silky nutmeg-dusted custard wobbling in crisp pastry — the bakery-counter classic that England has loved since the court of Richard III.
Serves 870 min totalModerate
Medieval / Easter
Simnel Cake
The Easter fruit cake with a marzipan heart and eleven marzipan apostles on top — served since medieval Mothering Sunday.
Serves 12145 min totalInvolved
Medieval / PGI protected
The Cornish Pasty
Protected by European law and Cornish pride: beef skirt, potato, swede and onion crimped in a sturdy shortcrust — a complete meal for the tin miner’s hand.
Makes 4 large pasties90 min totalModerate
Medieval sauce, eternal bird
Roast Chicken with Bread Sauce
A properly roasted free-range bird with burnished skin, served with medieval England’s greatest gift to the dinner table — clove-and-onion bread sauce.
Serves 4105 min totalModerate
Michaelmas / Dickensian
Roast Goose with Sage & Onion Stuffing
Before turkey there was goose — burnished, rich and generous, with its own lake of precious fat for the best roast potatoes you will ever eat.
Serves 6190 min totalInvolved
Mid-century
Sausage & Bean Casserole
Browned sausages braised with beans, tomatoes and smoked paprika — the slow cooker’s most-searched British supper, four ingredients from a tin and proud of it.
Serves 465 min totalEasy
Mid-century pub board
The Ploughman’s Lunch
A wedge of mature cheddar, crusty bread, pickled onions, chutney and an apple — the cold lunch that defined the British pub garden. No cooking, only standards.
Serves 210 min totalEasy
Modern classic
Proper Bacon Butty
Crisp streaky bacon in a soft white bap with a lash of butter — the nation’s favourite handheld breakfast, no garnish required and none wanted.
Makes 213 min totalEasy
Chicken & Mushroom Pie
Poached chicken and chestnut mushrooms folded through a tarragon cream sauce, lidded with shattering puff pastry — the nation’s favourite pie filling in poll after poll.
Serves 470 min totalModerate
Lemon Drizzle Cake
Year after year among Britain’s most-baked and most-searched cakes — a soft lemon sponge impregnated with a crackling citrus syrup.
Serves 8–1065 min totalEasy
Orchard country tradition
Dorset Apple Cake
A sturdy, apple-crowded cake from cider country — served warm with clotted cream after a walk, as is the law in Dorset tearooms.
Serves 875 min totalEasy
Post-war grill room
Gammon, Egg & Chips
A thick gammon steak with a caramelised edge, a properly fried egg and a pile of chips — the pub grill’s eternal trio. Pineapple ring negotiable.
Serves 235 min totalEasy
Pottage tradition
Pea & Ham Soup
Split peas simmered to a velvet pottage with a ham hock’s smoky riches — London particular’s edible ancestor, built for the coldest days.
Serves 4–6135 min totalEasy
Pub essential
Slow Onion Gravy
Onions caramelised for a patient half hour into a dark, glossy gravy — the only acceptable flood for bangers, mash, or toad in the hole.
Makes about 600ml40 min totalEasy
Raj era
Mulligatawny Soup
“Pepper-water” brought home from India and made our own — a curried chicken and rice soup sharpened with apple and lemon.
Serves 460 min totalEasy
Regency revival
Beef Wellington
Fillet of beef wrapped in mushroom duxelles, cured ham and golden puff pastry — the great celebration centrepiece, back on Britain’s most-cooked list for every special occasion.
Serves 685 min totalInvolved
Roman Britain onwards
Whitstable Oysters with Shallot Vinegar
Native Whitstable oysters eaten as the Romans found them — raw, cold, with nothing but a sharp mignonette of shallots and red wine vinegar.
Serves 2 (6 oysters)15 min totalEasy
School-dinner legend
Manchester Tart
Jam, custard, coconut and a cherry in crisp pastry — the school-dinner tart that Mancunians defend with the same passion as their football clubs.
Serves 865 min totalModerate
Seaside classic
Cromer Dressed Crab
Sweet Cromer crab — brown meat enriched with yolk and mayonnaise, white meat left pure — arranged back in its shell with lemon and brown bread.
Serves 2–430 min totalModerate
Smokehouse classic
Smoked Mackerel with Horseradish Cream
Peppered smoked mackerel with a fierce horseradish cream — oily fish, sharp heat, brown bread. The 15-minute starter that never misses.
Serves 4 (starter)15 min totalEasy
Sunday institution
Perfect Roast Potatoes
Fluffy inside, shattering outside — the most-argued-over side dish in Britain, settled here with Maris Pipers, hot dripping and a good rattle of the colander.
Serves 4–675 min totalEasy
Timeless
Leek & Potato Soup
Silky, pale and quietly perfect — leeks sweated long and slow in butter, blended with floury potatoes and finished with cream.
Serves 450 min totalEasy
Cream of Mushroom Soup
Field and chestnut mushrooms browned hard for depth, blended with cream and a whisper of garlic — everything the tinned version dreams of being.
Serves 445 min totalEasy
Victorian
The Full English Breakfast
The undisputed king of breakfasts — back bacon, butcher’s sausages, eggs, beans, black pudding, grilled tomato and fried bread, all cooked in one pan wherever possible.
Serves 230 min totalEasy
Smoked Haddock Kedgeree
Flaked smoked haddock folded through buttery curried rice with soft eggs and parsley — the great Anglo-Indian breakfast dish of the Raj, still unbeatable on a slow weekend.
Serves 445 min totalModerate
Crumpets with Salted Butter
Hot toasted crumpets riddled with holes, drowned in salted butter that runs straight through — best eaten leaning over the plate.
Makes 8 crumpets40 min totalModerate
Roast Leg of Lamb with Mint Sauce
Studded with garlic and rosemary, roasted to a blush, and cut with sharp, sweet home-made mint sauce — Easter’s essential centrepiece.
Serves 6115 min totalModerate
Honey-Glazed Gammon
Gently simmered gammon finished in the oven with a sticky honey, mustard and clove glaze — glorious hot on Boxing Day and even better cold from the fridge.
Serves 8145 min totalModerate
Toad in the Hole
Butcher’s sausages sunk into a smoking-hot Yorkshire batter that rises in golden crags around them — served only ever with a lake of onion gravy.
Serves 450 min totalEasy
Shepherd’s Pie
Minced lamb simmered in rich gravy under a furrowed, golden mash — the correct shepherd’s pie is always lamb, and always better the day after.
Serves 4–685 min totalModerate
Steak & Ale Pie
Slow-braised beef in a dark ale gravy beneath a buttery shortcrust lid — Britain’s most-ordered pub pie and the one every gastropub is judged by.
Serves 4–6180 min totalModerate
Steak & Kidney Pie
The aristocrat of English pies — beef and ox kidney in a thick, peppery gravy under golden pastry. A pie that demands respect and a large appetite.
Serves 4–6180 min totalModerate
Proper Fish Pie
Smoked haddock, cod and prawns in a parsley cream sauce beneath buttery mash — coastal England’s answer to the shepherd’s pie, and a Friday night institution.
Serves 4–670 min totalModerate
Steak & Kidney Pudding
England’s great steamed suet pudding — hours of gentle steaming produce a pale, tender crust around beef and kidney swimming in their own rich gravy.
Serves 4275 min totalInvolved
Pie, Mash & Liquor
The Cockney sacrament: minced beef pies with mash and “liquor” — a vivid green parsley sauce that has nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with the East End.
Serves 485 min totalModerate
Liver, Bacon & Onions
Calves’ liver flashed in the pan — never stewed — with crisp bacon, melting onions and proper gravy. The dish that converts liver sceptics, if it’s cooked right.
Serves 235 min totalEasy
Watercress Soup
Peppery Hampshire watercress whirled into a vivid green soup — the flavour of chalk streams and spring, ready in twenty minutes.
Serves 430 min totalEasy
Cauliflower Cheese
Whole-baked cauliflower under a proper cheddar béchamel, bronzed and bubbling — the side dish that routinely upstages the roast itself.
Serves 4–650 min totalEasy
Victoria Sponge
Named for the Queen herself: two golden sponges, raspberry jam, softly whipped cream and a snowfall of caster sugar. The Women’s Institute standard against which all cakes are judged.
Serves 8–1050 min totalModerate
Spotted Dick with Custard
The steamed suet pudding with the schoolboy-famous name — currant-spotted, lemon-scented, and impossible to serve without custard and a straight face.
Serves 6110 min totalEasy
Eton Mess
Strawberries, cream and crushed meringue — the gloriously chaotic pudding of the Eton–Harrow cricket match, at its absolute best in high summer.
Serves 620 min totalEasy
Treacle Tart
Golden syrup, breadcrumbs and lemon in crisp shortcrust — Harry Potter’s favourite and Britain’s stickiest slice, served warm with cream.
Serves 865 min totalModerate
Jam Roly-Poly
Suet pastry rolled around raspberry jam and steamed until pillowy — the school-dinner legend known affectionately everywhere as “dead man’s arm”.
Serves 6110 min totalEasy
Victorian (1860s)
Fish & Chips
Britain’s national takeaway: cod in a crisp, singing batter with thick-cut chips, salt, vinegar and mushy peas. One of the few dishes spared wartime rationing — morale itself, fried.
Serves 245 min totalModerate
Victorian (1884)
Battenberg Cake
The pink-and-yellow chequerboard wrapped in marzipan — created for a royal wedding in 1884 and still the most architecturally satisfying slice on any cake stand.
Serves 870 min totalInvolved
Victorian (by happy accident)
Bakewell Tart
Born of a misunderstood order at the Rutland Arms: raspberry jam under a soft frangipane in crisp shortcrust — Derbyshire’s gift to the tea table.
Serves 8–1075 min totalModerate
Victorian codification
Christmas Pudding
Made on Stir-up Sunday, steamed for hours, aged for weeks, and carried to the table in flames — the most ceremonial dish in the English year.
Serves 8–10520 min totalInvolved
Victorian nursery
Old-Fashioned Baked Rice Pudding
Short-grain rice baked long and slow in sweetened milk under a burnished nutmeg skin — the nursery pudding that divides families over whether the skin is the best bit. (It is.)
Serves 4–6155 min totalEasy
Victorian spa pudding
Summer Pudding
White bread soaked through with the juice of summer berries until it turns the colour of a garnet — the great no-bake pudding of the English summer.
Serves 635 min totalEasy
Victorian tea ritual
Scones with Clotted Cream & Jam
The cream tea at the centre of Britain’s politest war: Devon says cream first, Cornwall says jam. We take no sides — only seconds.
Makes 827 min totalEasy
Victorian thrift
Salmon & Haddock Fishcakes
Flaked fish and buttery mash in a crisp golden crust — born of Victorian thrift, now the backbone of a thousand gastropub menus.
Makes 8 (serves 4)40 min totalEasy
WWI slang, eternal dish
Bangers & Mash with Onion Gravy
Our namesake and Britain’s most-loved pub plate: proper butcher’s sausages on cloud-soft mash, drowned in slow-caramelised onion gravy. “Bangers” for the way they burst in the pan — we cook them gently so they never do.
Serves 450 min totalEasy
Wartime classic
Cheese & Onion Pie
Lancashire’s great vegetarian pie — sweet slow onions and sharp cheddar in shortcrust, born of ration-book ingenuity and still on every northern chippy counter.
Serves 680 min totalModerate
Wartime invention
Apple Crumble
Britain’s most-baked pudding — born when rationing killed the pie, perfected by every family since. Bramleys beneath a rubble of butter, flour and sugar.
Serves 655 min totalEasy
West Country bakery
Lardy Cake
A Wiltshire bakery legend — enriched dough layered with lard, sugar and fruit, baked until the bottom becomes a caramel. Not for the faint-hearted; entirely for the happy.
Serves 1275 min totalModerate
Winter tradition
Honey-Roast Parsnips & Roots
Parsnips and carrots roasted hot in honey and mustard until burnished and candy-edged — the sweet counterweight in every Christmas and Sunday spread.
Serves 4–660 min totalEasy