Terence Laybourne

On 8th October, 1994, a bold headline on the food pages of the Independent read: ‘The Newcastle stotty bounces back’. According to Terence Laybourne, who wrote the article, a ‘stotty’ is a kind of local cake which takes its name from the habit of bouncing, or ‘stotting’, the freshly baked dough on the kitchen floor to test its quality. The better the bounce, the tastier the stotty. Laybourne goes on to describe the origins of this flat, discus-shaped speciality, explaining that it used to be a staple of the ‘poverty cuisine’ which sustained the miners and shipyard workers in the Twenties and Thirties. The recipe, one notes, includes a pinch of white pepper and several pinches of salt. Laybourne is being perfectly serious about all this – for the record, Greggs of Gosforth bake 70,000 stotties a week – but he is a Geordie, and Geordies love to take the mickey.