Selby High School wins Heritage Lottery Support

Selby High School has received £4,500 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project ‘Not Just Puddings and Parkin’.  Students from the Let’s Get Cooking and Growing Club will investigate traditional Yorkshire food heritage and look at Yorkshire farming, fishing, food production and preservation methods.  They will research and recreate traditional Yorkshire dishes using time honoured recipes and cooking techniques and visit local food producers and farmers to experience long-established methods first hand.  Students will share all they discover and learn by producing a cook book crammed with recipes, pictures and information. The book will be available to download or in hard copy, once completed.

Selby High School are continually looking for new ways to stimulate and excite students to learn outside the classroom and the normal school day. Mrs Lynne Bentley, teacher and creator of the Let’s Get Cooking Club said “This is a great opportunity for us to explore our heritage through food and to also really get to grips with the idea of ‘from garden to plate’ dining.  We are looking forward to going back to our roots and looking at the interesting recipes and ingredients our grandparents and great grandparents brought us up on, and then to replicate these using some of our own home grown produce.”

Headteacher, Mr Paul Eckersley said, “This is a wonderful opportunity for our young people to learn about their local history and how their parents, grandparents and great grandparents grew and prepared their food, compared to the ‘fast food, ready-made’ world we now live in.”

Selby High School are also looking for support from the community and would love to hear from anyone with an old Yorkshire family recipe, handed down through generations, that they would be happy to share. They would also like to meet with any local farmers and food producers who are still using traditional methods and who would be willing to show and share their work with the students involved.

Using money raised through the National Lottery, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) aims to make a lasting difference for heritage, people and communities across the UK to help build a resilient heritage economy.  From museums, parks and historic places to archaeology, natural environment and cultural traditions, we invest in every part of our diverse heritage. HLF has supported over 36,000 projects with more than £6bn across the UK including £440m to over 3,100 projects in Yorkshire & the Humber alone. www.hlf.org.uk

If you are able to help with our ‘Not Just Puddings and Parkin’ project or would like any further information, please contact Lorraine Chambers at Selby High School on 01757 244816.