Charter Day 2021: have you got a recipe for the Wellington Ale Taster’s cook book?

Every year on Charter Day (the first Saturday in March) we get together in the Market Square and appoint the ceremonial roles of Town Crier, Clerk of the Market and Ale Taster. Jerry has been our Ale Taster for nearly a decade, and makes it his business to promote all the great food and drink that Wellington and its environs has to offer. With our regular Charter Day event cancelled this year, Jerry is using the occasion to launch a new project that will help us celebrate Wellington’s food offer – past and present – in a different way: he’s making a Wellington Cook Book!

The aim is to compile a wide range of recipes with a distinctive Wellington flavour. That could mean restaurants and cafes lifting the lid on some of their own popular recipes; butchers, bakers and grocers suggesting recipes based on their own produce; or even ‘rescued’ recipes from much-missed Wellington food businesses of old. And we don’t just want to hear from businesses, either – if you have an old family recipe with a local connection that you’d love to share, let us know. Exactly what counts as a ‘local connection’ is open to interpretation – maybe its a strange old-fashioned pudding your Wellington ancestors were making a hundred years ago, a favourite cake your grandad always took on his walks up The Wrekin; or a home-style curry your family brought to Wellington from their homeland. What really matters is that this is an original recipe or your version of a recipe – NOT something lifted from a published cook book or from someone’s cooking website. We don’t want to infringe any copyrights. We’d also like to avoid recipes involving branded biscuits and chocolate bars (e.g. a cakes with Oreos or Maltesers stuck on the top!)

So, here’s how it will work. If you’d like to submit a recipe (or a couple of recipes), email us the following details using the form below, telling us:

• Your name
• Your email address
• A simple description of your recipe including its name and its main ingredients (you don’t need to send the full ingredients list and method at this stage – we’ll ask for that later if your recipe is one that we want to include in the final book)
• Any additional info about the recipe – e.g. is it something your granny used to make? If so, tell us a bit about her and email us a photo!

We don’t know what sort of response to expect, but in case we’re overwhelmed with suggestions we can’t commit to publishing everything we receive in the final cook book. We need to avoid duplications of the same thing, for instance, and want to ensure a good balance of recipes overall. Our team of volunteer compilers will be helping Jerry turn the recipes we receive into something that can be published later in the year – at least online, and hopefully ‘for real’ too. So, let’s get cooking…