Georgie Revill is the owner and personality behind the Cook Shack, a bespoke cookery school and catering business based in Bride, in the north of the Isle of Man. She has been busy during the lockdown period, creating and promoting recipes made with as much local produce as possible.

Here she shares a recipe for her home-made crumpets.

’Nice bit of Crumpet.’

I’ve always wondered where this phase derived from.

It’s a humorous term for a person who is popular with the opposite sex because of their intelligence and their physical attractiveness.

The expression is derived from the slang use of the term ’crumpet’ to refer to a woman who is regarded as an object of desire.

Apparently crumpet in this sense is a rhyming shortening of the phrase ’cheeky strumpet’, a strumpet being a lady of the night.

I certainly didn’t know about that last phrase!

But why call the divine rounded, squishy, holey, morsels of perfectness ’crumpets’? Crumpets, as we know and love them, are an Anglo-Saxon invention and, initially, they were hard pancakes baked on a griddle.

The term ’crumpet’ has Celtic origins and dates from the 1600s.

The name is related to the Breton "kranpoez", a type of a thin, flat pancake, or the Welsh type of pancake called, ’crempog’. The Manx word for crumpet is ’Crumpag’.

These griddled breads or pancakes are made and loved all over the world.

They are so versatile and can be made in advance and frozen for future use.

With the birth of the new Facebook page, ’Manx Bread Matters’, there appears to be a little crumpet craze going on, so now is the perfect time to give them a try.

Please feel free to experiment with the recipe and, most of all, always use our fabulous Laxey Mills Flour. It is full of protein with no additives or preservatives.

You do need crumpet rings to make these work.

These can be found from any good kitchen hardware shop, such as Butler’s Choice in Douglas, Jac Stores or Felton’s in Ramsey.

Manx crumpets

Ingredients, enough to make four servings:

One tablespoon of sugar.

200ml of Manx whole milk.

100ml boiling water.

1 tablespoon dried yeast (I recommend Fermipan available from Robinson’s).

150 grams of Laxey Queen flour, a strong white variety, and 100 grams of Laxey plain, all-purpose flour.

One teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda.

20 grams of Isle of Man Creameries butter, for cooking.

Method:

Mix the sugar, milk and boiling water in a jug and stir in the yeast. Leave in a warm place for 15 minutes until frothy.

Combine the Laxey Mill flours in a large mixing bowl with the salt. Stir in the liquid and mix vigorously until smooth.

Cover the bowl and leave in a warm place for between one-and-a-half and two hours until the batter is a mass of tiny bubbles.

Mix the bicarbonate of soda with 50ml of warm water and stir it into the batter.

Cover again and leave in a warm place for 30 minutes.

Now you are ready to cook your crumpets!

Take your crumpet rings and brush the inside of them with a good coating of butter.

Heat a large frying pan on a medium-low heat and grease the pan with a little more butter.

Put the rings flat into the pan and ladle a spoonful of batter into each, so they are about half full.

You should let these cook until the top is dry and full with holes, then push the crumpets out of the rings.

If you are eating your crumpets immediately after cooking, you can finish them off by toasting the tops under a hot grill until golden, then serve with as much delicious butter and jam as you want.

However, if you’re keeping them for later, you can cool your crumpets on a wire rack.

These can be kept or even frozen, then toasted on both sides to reheat.

We all know that crumpets are best eaten in the Isle of Man with lashings of Manx Creamery butter and any of the local jams from Staarvey Farms.

They are also a perfectly good savoury dish too, and go wonderfully with fresh, poached eggs, a dollop of hollandaise sauce and some Manx bacon. You can always add extra flavourings to them like dried herbs, chopped walnuts and apricots.

More details are available from cookshack.im