Is the Lake District still as Wainwright described it?
The Lake District isn't really meant to be about eating. It's about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and eaten atop a precariously balanced upturned log rather than a restaurant table. The culinary highlight should be Kendal mint cake, gratefully retrieved from the pocket of your cagoule. And so I was as surprised as anyone to find real gastronomic delights on a recent trip.
Not from Little Chef, though that was where Wainwright religiously went for his favourite meal: fish and chips, a gooseberry pancake and cup of tea. While the fells may stand immutable, the culinary landscape of the Lakes is unrecognisable from Wainwright's day. Thus, in this polite slice of England, I found an operatic dollop of Italian gusto in Villa Positano, tucked off the high street in Bowness-on-Windermere. As with San Pietro nearby, it's all family-run charm with the odd culinary mishap waved away as trattoria rusticism in a way only an Italian can get away with. Together with a trendy sourdough pizza joint just up the road (Base Pizza), it appears a small group of Italians have decided they've had it with Lake Como and are making Lake Windermere home instead. Though no amount of tiramisu can surpass a sticky toffee pudding from Cartmel.
Then there is the famed Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread. Spicy and sweet, it is like the ginger nut of one's dreams. Wordsworth's grave is just around the corner, in the shadow of St Oswald's Church, and I wander lonely as a cloud through the wild daffodil garden planted in his honour. There is nothing wrong with cliché when it is this idyllic.
In Ambleside there is lots to enjoy. The venerable Great North Pie Co (choose between chicken and Stornoway black pudding or 14-hour braised beef, Manchester union lager and Henderson's Relish). Serious fine dining is to be found at Lake Road Kitchen and Old Stamp House, both with Michelin stars. To enjoy a roast loin of the region's iconic Herdwick lamb, there is the beautiful restaurant at Rothay Manor. Or for ales brewed on-site and hunks of sourdough dipped into fir oil and stout vinegar, drop into the Drunken Duck Inn. You can munch on fish and chips at the Waterhead, overlooking Windermere. Though a sign advertises that the chips are fried in oil, not beef dripping, and the fish batter made without beer. That is nothing to show off about.
What else? You can sit outside at the Windermere Jetty Museum's cafe, spotting fast jets on low-flying training manoeuvres from nearby RAF Spadeadam. In Grasmere, stop for coffee at Mathilde's, or on the little terrace of the Tea Gardens by the stream. Lunch at Lingholm Kitchen, walking off your meal in the walled garden as Beatrix Potter used to do. Dinner could be at Fellpack House in Keswick, The Schelly in Ambleside or Brackenrigg Inn in Ullswater, or more upmarket at Heft in High Newton, or The Cedar Tree at Farlam Hall near Brampton.
Come morning, we report to a retro 1950s dining room, frozen in aspic. What follows is one of the best cooked breakfasts in the land
The Lakes may boast the (three Michelin) starry heights of Simon Rogan's L'Enclume, but there are simpler culinary pleasures to be found from a rucksack. A picnic at Friars Crag in Keswick, or at Haystacks, Wainwright's favourite. A hunk of ewe's milk cheese nibbled under a tree near Cockshot Point. The contents of your hip flask while watching the sunset at Fleetwith Pike.
Arriving in the driving rain to the Old Rectory near Coniston, there is complimentary hot tea and moist cake served from bone china. The lemon and poppy seed is homemade by Ann who runs the B&B assisted − or impeded − by her other half, Michael (half Falstaff half Manuel from Fawlty Towers). We fill out complicated forms for our breakfast order (I half expect a Farrow & Ball colour chart to pick my preferred tea strength) and, come morning, report to a retro 1950s dining room, frozen in aspic. A Japanese couple inspect the golden syrup with close fascination while a colossal Hyacinth Bucket holds a fan in one hand and skewers kiwi with the other. What follows is one of the best cooked breakfasts in the land – the Cumberland sausage dense, the Cumbrian back bacon just the right amount of crisp. Not even reading over breakfast of the sewage discharges into Windermere can ruin it. Ann troops out from the kitchen concerned my boiled eggs are too hard. They aren't; they are what all eggs should aspire to be.
The eating options in the Lake District may be better now than in Wainwright's day, but the Lakes also differ in a way that would not have pleased him: the crowds. Alfred would go out of his way to avoid fellow hikers, seeking seclusion. 'There are boulders you can get behind,' he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs. One can still find escape here thankfully (tip: the North Lakes are less crowded than the South) but nowadays, in peak season and good weather, to dodge other walkers you might have to hide behind your boulder for rather a long time before the coast is clear. Good food is good. But a soggy sandwich and a Kendal mint cake isn't bad, so long as it's consumed in the bliss of solitude.
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