Stottie and pease pudding: the North East’s oldest double act

A stottie is a round, flat loaf from North East England, white with patches of brown, and sometimes with a dent in the middle. It’s denser than an ordinary loaf because the dough gets one rise instead of two. Then it’s baked on the bottom of the oven.

Why “stottie”

The name may come from the North East word “stot”, meaning to bounce. One theory is that the dough was thrown, or stotted, onto the oven floor. Wikipedia only says “perhaps”, and the bread has been around since at least before the Second World War. Nobody kept better notes than that. Split one across the middle and it’ll take ham, bacon, sausage, mushrooms or a fried egg. It also takes the North East’s other speciality.

The yellow stuff

Pease pudding is made from split yellow peas, boiled with water, salt and spices, and often cooked with a bacon or ham joint. It’s thick, pale yellow and mild, something like a firm hummus. It’s eaten to a lesser extent elsewhere in Britain, and Cockneys in London’s East End once ate it with saveloys. But it’s traditionally a dish of the industrial North East, from Newcastle and South Shields down through Sunderland to Darlington. It’s usually served with ham or bacon, beetroot and stotties.

It’s also one layer of the saveloy dip, a North East sandwich that takes some explaining. A saveloy goes in a bun with stuffing, pease pudding and English mustard. Then the bun is dipped in the water the saveloy was boiled in, or in gravy. If you’ve never had one, that sentence is probably doing you no favours. If you have, you’re already hungry.

Where to get one

The Grainger Market is the easiest place to start. NE1’s Get Into Newcastle guide says Hunters Deli, in the Arcade, first opened “almost 70 years ago”, and it recommends its “legendary ham and pease pudding stotties”. (Hunters isn’t on our map yet.)

In Alley 1, Lindsay Bros, a long-running fishmonger, has opened a seafood bar selling stotties with Craster kippers, hake fish fingers or Northumbrian crab. It’s not traditional, but nobody said it had to be.

And King Baby Bagels, also in Alley 1, makes a bagel called the 0191 (that’s Tyneside’s dialling code). It has salted ham, pease pudding, dill pickle and mustard. Strictly it’s not a stottie, but it’s the same idea in a different bread.

Log yours, and tell us whether it was butter or no butter. We all know there’s a right answer.