Pease Pudding and Ham Stottie

January in the Northeast is a different sort of cold. The kind that gets into your coat before you've left the doorstep. This is what that weather wants you to eat.

I had my first pease pudding stottie at a bakery counter in Newcastle, standing on a pavement that was silver with frost. The bread was dense and pale, the size of a dinner plate. The pease pudding inside was thick and golden, almost the colour of egg yolk, and the ham was pink and soft and pulled from a hock that morning. I ate it in about four minutes and thought about it for the rest of the week. I wrote it down in the notebook that evening: ham, pease pudding, stottie. Cold day. Perfect.

Pease pudding is one of those old, quiet foods that does its work without asking for attention. Yellow split peas, simmered for hours alongside a ham hock until they collapse into something savoury and rich and impossibly smooth. The ham gives everything to the peas, and the peas give body back to the broth. One pot. Two things you need. The stottie cake is the only bread for the job: flat, dense, floury, chewy, built to hold something substantial without falling apart in your hands.

You can buy both from a good bakery in the Northeast, and you should if you're there. But making them at home is a Saturday afternoon's quiet work. The kitchen will smell of bread dough and simmering peas and smoky ham, and that, on a cold day, is worth the effort on its own.