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Fruit cake and cheese: Yorkshire’s own odd couple

As we at Bettys well know, Yorkshire’s culinary delights are many, from treacle-sticky parkin and dainty curd tarts to the joy of a perfectly risen Yorkshire pudding. But one local invention still prompts double takes beyond the county’s borders – the idea that however fine your slice of fruit cake, it can always be improved by the addition of cheese.

Cheese? Oh yes. If you’re yet to have the pleasure, consider it for a moment: what better pairing could there be than the tangy-sweet complexity of a rich fruit cake and the tart creaminess offered by a cheese such as Yorkshire’s own Wensleydale.

No one knows exactly which genius was the first Yorkshire man or woman to seek out this taste sensation, but the custom was firmly established by Victorian times, with Joseph Lucas’s 1871 book Studies In Nidderdale describing how, “On Christmas Eve one Yule Cake is given to each member of the family, along with a piece of Christmas cheese.” The association with Christmas is likely due to how Wensleydale was traditionally made in spring and summer and matured until at least autumn. Once a seasonal treat to be savoured, now there’s no need to wait until December.

At Bettys we’re a little embarrassed by our slowness in embracing fruit cake with cheese. Although the former has always been a favourite in our cafés – one advert from 1934 celebrates the sale of 8,625lb of plum cake the previous year – we only started offering it with a slab of cheese in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, it’s been a regular visitor to our menus ever since.

If you’d like to try it at home, we recommend our Christmas Fruit Cake, with its plump, sherry-soaked vine fruits, our similarly moist Soft Iced Christmas Cake, or our Yorkshire Tea Loaf, with fruits steeped in the much-loved brew. And while nothing beats a slice of classic Wensleydale, why not explore its crumbly cousins Lancashire and Caerphilly, or strike out with speciality cheddars such as Y Fenni, or even full-flavoured blue varieties? After all, it’s too good a thing to keep to Yorkshire.