Traditional Speke Hall recipes to try at home

You can tuck into delicious dishes at Speke Hall all year round but if you want to recreate them at home, here are some of our favourite recipes. From sweet treats like Wet Nelly and Liverpool Tart to warming main meals like Scouse and Pan Haggerty, there's plenty to keep you busy in the kitchen.

A dish of Scouse in the Speke Hall restaurant
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Scouse

Originally brought to Liverpool by Northern European sailors and known as labskause, this is the region's best known dish and every household has their own slightly different recipe.

Discover how to cook Liverpool's most famous dish
Potatoes grown by Peter and Gina Smithies in Pembrokeshire
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Pan Haggerty

Pan Haggerty is one of the simplest vegetable dishes in British cooking, but one of the best. It is a dish that tells a story of poverty and ingenuity, and also of the close links that the North still has with Scotland.

Grab some spuds and get cooking
Speke Hall's local delicacy, Wet Nelly
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Wet Nelly

Try your hand at making a bit of Wet Nelly, a cake with a big history and a firm favourite at Speke Hall.

Read the recipe
Liverpool Tart, a Speke Hall speciality.
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Liverpool Tart

The earliest known mention of a Liverpool Tart is from 1897 when it was written into a family cookbook. This recipe has been a staple in many working class Liverpool homes throughout the years since then.

Try our version of this historic recipe
Volunteers at work in the Kitchen Garden at Speke Hall
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Kitchen Garden Cobbler

In wartime Liverpool, cobblers and crumbles were promoted by the Ministry of Food as an alternative to pies as they were more filling, required less butter and used up any leftovers or home grown ingredients. Cobblers are still a very popular Northern dish and can be sweet or savoury. This one uses produce grown in our Kitchen Garden, just feet away from the Restaurant.

Try our special recipe
Chicken buknade
Speke Hall   Liverpool

Buknade and manchet

In Tudor times, Buknade was a thick stew traditionally made with chicken or veal. It was served hot with chunky vegetables and herbs from the garden and if you were well off it was served with manchet - a small white loaf or bun. The original recipe has a very strong Tudor flavour, including egg yolk and a lot of clove & saffron in it, which we have decided not to use.

Read the recipe
Delicious and divine scones
Cakes and bakes

Scones 

Everyone needs a good scone recipe and this one is tried, tested and loved by hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. You just need to decide if it's jam or cream first...

Read the recipe