The real thinking woman’s crumpet

GRIDDLED GREATS This comforting classic is being reimagined, writes Sue Quinn – anyone for lobster?

Aboyfriend once wooed me with home-made crumpets. It required time and patience to make them from scratch, but the results were worth it. Hot from the frying pan, with a pat of butter and a pool of golden syrup melting into the honeycomb of bubbles, they were utterly delicious. And, reader, I married him.

Unsurprisingly, I’m gratified to see a fresh wave of crumpet love sweeping the nation. The British have always adored them – Warburton’s supplies 1.5 million to UK consumers each week. But recently, our passion for crumpets seems to have grown more urgent. No longer confined to scoffing fireside with a cup of tea, crumpets are popping up on restaurant menus, drenched in a gorgeous – and sometimes unexpected – array of sweet and savoury flavours.

“Everyone enjoys a crumpet,” says Neil Campbell, head chef at Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest London restaurant, Rovi. His crumpet lobster toast, a posh take on the Chinese classic prawn toast, is piled with lobster meat, covered with black and white sesame seeds, and served with a kumquat and chilli dipping sauce. It’s already approaching cult status, if the number of posts on Instagram is anything to go by. “I think it’s the open, chewy texture of crumpets that we like,” Campbell says. “Rather than using something like a sourdough bread, a crumpet seemed to have a much better texture and was the perfect base.”

Campbell is one of many chefs turning the afternoon-tea classic into inventive meals. It’s the holes, those reservoirs of deliciousness, that make crumpets a particularly joyous vehicle for flavours. The brunch menu at Dublin’s Clanbrassil House recently featured home-made crumpets with smoked beef cheeks and brown butter egg yolks. At Cornerstone restaurant in east London, chef Tom Brown offers potted shrimp crumpets topped with kohlrabi, gherkin and parsley. Meanwhile, at The Wigmore in London, diners are devouring buttered crumpets with steamed crab.

The Scallop Shell fish and chip shop in Bath has crumpet starters, including a crab version with brown crabmeat that spreads like butter and sinks into the pores of the crumpet, then topped with white crabmeat, a poached egg and hollandaise sauce. “It brings back memories,” says owner Garry Rosser. “It’s feels right for us to serve crumpets because we’re a fish and chip restaurant, and they’re another comforting classic.”

It’s true. We also adore crumpets for the nostalgia they evoke; a thoroughly British invention, they have deep cultural associations. Whether buttered and sliced into fingers as nursery food, topped with cheese after an alcohol-fuelled night at the pub or drenched in honey and devoured after a winter walk, crumpets have a special place in our food memories.

The origins of the word itself are a little hazy. One of the earliest references is said to come from Englishman John Wycliffe, the scholar and Bible translator, who mentioned a “crompid cake” in 1382. In the Thirties, the word became a colloquial term for a female object of sexual desire – possibly rhyming slang for strumpet.

But the version of crumpets we adore today, with the lovely bubbles, probably developed in Victorian times when yeast and baking powder were added to the pancake batter. When the leavened batter is placed on a griddle pan in a ring to prevent it spreading,

It’s those holes that make crumpets a particularly joyous vehicle for flavours