A housing development uncovered a brick etched with the word "PEASE," revealing a forgotten aspect of the North East's culinary history. Linked to the 1840s industrial expansion via the Stockton & Darlington Railway, Gregory Coopland investigates how the region’s staple food was mass-produced to feed workers during a transformative era.
Those with an interest in Scottish or Irish history may be familiar with ‘bog butter’, ancient preserved butter discovered in peat bogs, where the low oxygen and cold environment prevented it from going off. County Durham’s version of bog butter, located in small quantities on the outskirts of the quaint market town of Crook during recent housing development, sheds light on another aspect of the North East’s distinctive culinary past.
The discovery of a brick shaped item stamped PEASE, face-up in the two-foot down scraped surface courtesy of a JCB, was not overly surprising – after all, the nearby fire brick works at Peases West churned out many millions of bricks stamped like this. But as a souvenir hunter, who has spoken to me on condition of anonymity as he was there bottle collecting, went to dig it out by hand and got on his knees to do so, he was surprised by the familiar scent it gave off, but not one associated with bricks. It smelt of Pease pudding – and after a small piece crumbled away in his hand, the consistency (and taste test) near-confirmed it, with detailed analysis courtesy of his sister who works in a county council food testing lab giving 100% surety. The origins of a compressed block of Pease pudding were not exactly forgotten, more that it was an aspect of North East history that no one really cared about – but one that links in to the wider history of the area in which it was found.
In 1842, the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened a railway tunnel underneath the town of Shildon. This allowed the Stockton & Darlington to expand into West Durham, which previously had been hindered by access to the area being over the Brusselton and Etherley inclined planes west of Shildon, hampering how much traffic could go by this route. Tunnelling through the high ground allowed a locomotive-worked railway to be built, and it was not long before the railway reached Bishop Auckland, spreading northwards to Crook in late 1843. It continued on, reaching up to Consett via the old Stanhope & Tyne railway in 1845 giving access to the new and rapidly growing iron works, and into Weardale to access the huge deposits of limestone. This would be transformative both for the Stockton & Darlington Railway and for the area now served by iron railway.
Crook was drastically changed swiftly after the arrival of the railway. Up until that point it had been an agricultural village, but railways now provided an efficient means of transporting the coal which lay close to the surface. Mining, and its associated industries, became the main employer in Crook, and chimneys soon overtook church steeples as landmarks. The major Stockton & Darlington Railway shareholder and Director family Peases, who owned many of the collieries that provided much of the traffic for the railway, had a major interest, opening Peases West, a colliery, coke ovens and brickworks in the town. The link between the colliery owner family of Pease’ and Pease pudding has been documented before, and like many regional-specific products, the introduction of railways caused expansion on a large scale.
The large numbers of people moving to West Durham to work in the new areas of industry needed feeding, with Pease pudding still considered to be suitable to make up a significant part of their diet. Pease’s looked to increase production of their pudding, and of course the railways were still the ideal means of transportation for this, but a combination of congested railways moving the millions of tons of minerals out of the area was not helped with the railway north of Crook, owing to the topography of the area, being an inclined plane which caused severe bottlenecks. Whilst producing Pease pudding itself in large quantities was not an issue after the opening in 1847 of the Pease pudding mill as part of the Peases West complex, shipment of it did not go as planned, with large holding pools having to be created to store it until it could be canned (using the relatively new process mainly used by suppliers to the Royal Navy and British Army). These were not successful, and in the summer heat the pudding caused a horrific smell and caked up swiftly, meaning after six months, production was halted. The solution came from an unknown source, but is believed to have originated by seeing a failed batch of bricks from the adjacent firebrick works, which had a consistency similar to Pease pudding.
By dehydrating the Pease pudding after it was made, it could then be shipped without fear of spoiling, and just needed heating up and softening with water to make it edible. The steam dehydration process also reduced its size, meaning it did not need as much space in a railway wagon, and was overall cheaper to make, and to buy. This meant it would be easier to find space for it in the congested railway system. There were already thousands of brick moulds available from the firebrick works, so constructing more of these to enable compressed bricks of Pease pudding at a regular size was simple. With some adjustments, the Pease pudding mill was opened, and production of large quantities of Pease pudding bricks was soon in full sway. It is possible that the famous railway locomotive ‘Locomotion’, built by Robert Stephenson & Co in 1825 and which hauled the first train on the Stockton & Darlington Railway, was involved in this process. After becoming obsolete on the railway, ‘Locomotion’ was lent to Peases West as a pumping engine from the 1840’s to early 1850’s, before being returned to the Stockton & Darlington Railway who, after restoring it to an approximate appearance of how it looked in 1825, put it on display in Darlington. The thick consistency of Pease pudding was known to require a great deal of power to be pumped from the vats to the puddling floor for pouring into the brick moulds. Local rumour has it that ‘Locomotion’ was involved in this, and this is how it gained the nickname of ‘Pudding Pumper’ in doing so.
The theory of Pease pudding being suitable for being made, dehydrated, shipped and sold in bulk, with customers just needing to add water and heat, worked. By the 1850’s, the Stockton & Darlington Railway spread from the iron ore fields of Cleveland and up to Consett, with the Pease family interests, influence – and pudding – following suit. The cheap but nourishing foodstuff was, for a time, popular amongst the workforce and their families along the route.
You may be wondering why this method of food preservation and transportation, which had the potential to revolutionise the feeding of the working classes of Britain, was not better known or had more impact rather than being strictly regional. The simple answer is that tastes change, together with it perhaps being a century too soon for this method of buying food to be widely popular. Demand fell off dramatically in the 1880’s, although Pease pudding, made in smaller batches and from smaller, more local suppliers, has remained popular in the North East. One theory is that this was an early incarnation of what we see today with the resurgence in popularity of local bakeries, butchers and others. Rather than purchase in bulk and of relatively low quality from a large business, essentially the equivalent of a supermarket or large corporation today, people may have preferred to buy better quality, more locally produced Pease pudding on a smaller scale. Its more generic production and acceptance into wider society away from the influence of the Pease family is likely the reason for Pease pudding becoming more generally known as peas pudding today. The pudding mill in Crook was simply converted into part of the expanding fire brick works.
Until the discovery of the County Durham equivalent of bog butter, there have been no serious studies into the mass production of Pease pudding. It is hoped the sole known remaining Pease pudding brick will go on display at a local museum, if suitable display conditions can be implemented, but until then it will remain in frozen storage in the private collection of the finder. Perhaps, its display and interpretation will create new interest in the hitherto little-researched history of working-class eating habits in North East England, building on the pioneering portrayal of fried fish shops by Beamish Museum.
With thanks to railway historian and writer Alan Reet for his assistance with details of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.
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