Foreign muck!

Even Newcastle-upon-Tyne's celebrated Stotty Cake is an import from South America. It goes back to the Indian Summer of 1902 when the circus of the celebrated Irish showman O'Carrageen fetched up on Newcastle's Town Moor. One of O'Carageen's performers was a native South American who went by the name of Apu the Aztec, who dazzled on an array of flutes, panpipes and suchlike exotica. The story goes that he fell in love with a local lass in nearby Gosforth and the two were soon married, thus did he introduce, amongst other things, the recipe for his native Metztli into the locality and it soon caught on. Traditionally the bread was only baked at the time of the full moon (Metztli being the Aztec word for the moon, the bread being round, white and baked in such a way that gave a pattern of lights and darks resembling nothing so much as the lunar surface). No such nonsense with the Geordies however, who took the recipe to their hearts and it soon spread around the provinces of Tyneside, the name changing as it went. These names are still found today, such as flatty and yestie (or yeastie), all of which, I am told, derive from the original. Indeed, in Gosforth they are known to this day as Measties or Mezzies. Stotty is but one of these derivations, the name favoured by Greggs of Gosforth, who still hold the original secret recipe of Apu the Aztec from more than a century ago. Locals might still remember the centenary celebrations of 2002 when at the time of the Hunter's Moon the loaves were baked in traditional clay ovens specially constructed on the Town Moor with music provided by the descendants of Apu the Aztec, who might still be seen performing their native chants and dirges on the streets of Newcastle to this day, as proud of their Aztec roots as the good people of Tyneside are proud of them.