Breadcakes or baps?

“Silly girl, those are bread rolls.”

That was my southerner friend Catherine’s reaction to my recent suggestion that a small round soft loaf of bread is called a “breadcake”.

See I’m from Yorkshire – a glorious place often called God’s Own Country, where grown men call each other love, the pudding is king and Sheffield Wednesday really is the ONLY football team worth supporting.

We’re famed for being an argumentative, bloody-minded and tight-fisted bunch, and as the old saying goes “a Yorkshireman is a Scotsman with all the generosity squeezed out of him”.

We’ve given the world the Brontes, Brian Clough, Jarvis Cocker, Sean Bean, Peter Stringfellow (apologies for that one), Henry Moore, Captain Cook, Jessica Ennis, Guy Fawkes, Alan Titchmarsh and William Wilberforce.

We invented Hendos. And Sheffield steel. And the rhubarb triangle.

And then of course there’s the dialect. A fat girl is a “bonny lass”, “duck” is a term of endearment, “chuffed” means very excited, “reet” means very (put them together - “reet chuffed”!), a  “reet bobby dazzler” is a good looking girl and, of course, a “breadcake” is what you use to make a sandwich.

But I work over the boarder in Derbyshire, where they make sandwiches with “cobs”.

And here comes the tenuous link to supermarkets.... the Derby Telegraph has this week been giving away free rolls (yes, rolls - the sanitised universally-understood term that the supermarkets use) to all readers from a local branch of Tesco.

Which has lead to The Great Breadcake Debate in the office..... mainly because they all think I’m mad for misnaming the cob!

And we've even had a bit of fun about cobs to go on our website this weekend... which you can see here.

But all over the country bread rolls go by different names. Scots say “baps”, while in Liverpool they are “barm cakes”. In Coventry they eat “batches”, a “bread bun” is becoming more popular thanks to hamburgers, and “teacakes” are enjoyed in Lancashire.

Disappointingly, if you shop in the supermarket, you’ll be used to seeing them marked up as bread rolls, because supermarkets rarely take heed of regional dialects.

And regional dialects are brilliant, variety is the price of life! Shop local and you’ll find your rolls labelled up as breadcakes, or cobs, or batches. Which is just so much better.