Jamie Oliver at Swillington Farm
Yorkshire foodies were all of a Twitter on Tuesday night during Jamie’s Great Britain on C4 when he was trolling around Yorkshire in his funny caravan complete with wood burning oven. The consensus seemed to be that he did a good job and made us all proud of Yorkshire.
It was refreshing that this wasn’t the usual round of Yorkshire Dales and Wensleydale cheese stories, though there was a Yorkshire Pudding item. He visited the King’s Arms at Heath, near Wakefield feigning surprise that Yorkshire’s were served as a starter to make the meat go further.
I was pleased to see they found some of the less discovered corners of the county, like the Jewish and Chinese communities in Leeds. They filmed a Chinese chef cooking up a lunch of sea bass at a Chinese community centre and some Jewish women in Oakwood describing their tradition of smoking and pickling. There was a good sequence with the guys from the Midnight Bell cooking with beer and they found a terrific Turkish restaurant that I’d love to know more about.
They then found Jamie ‘in the middle of nowhere’, nowhere being Swillington Organic Farm, Leeds who tweeted ‘our chickens are so free range they kept walking into shot’. The final scene was the sort of heavenly picnic we’re always having in these parts – tartan rugs spread out in a field: Wensleydale cheese, pork pies, Leeds Best ale and we even forgave him making Eccles cakes.