I ENJOYED a gustatory blast from the past the other day – steak and kidney pudding, chips and peas. The boy who sat behind me on our first day at grammar school 55 years ago was in Hexham for a flying visit, so nostalgic North-West nosh was the order of the day.

The meal proved fine seasoning as we giggled and guffawed our way through more than half a century of seriously psychopathic teachers, motor cycle escapades, and discussed which old school friends were dead, as well as the inevitable comparing of medical notes which advanced years brings.

We also marvelled at the fact that all the old pubs we used to go in used to have a piano rather than a juke box or piped music. He would sit down and belt out the top 10, or a spot of jazz, and nobody batted an eyelid. I can’t think of any pubs with a piano for customers now.

But while the meal at the well-known Hexham hostelry which hosted our meeting was perfectly pleasant, it has to be said it was but a pale shadow of the steak and kidney puddings of our Macclesfield youth.

Steak and kidney puddings – or baby’s heads as they were universally known – were our staple fare whilst we were growing up, and it was a real wrench when I moved to the North-East to discover, to my horror, that Northumberland was a steak and kidney pudding desert.

There is nothing to beat that glorious mound of steamed suet and offal, with just a hint of beef, all soaked in rich gravy, steaming proudly above a Matterhorn of golden chips and a slop of mushy peas.

Sticking a greasy chip through the fontanelle at the peak of the pudding, releasing a mini-fountain of rich juices, was an almost religious experience, and one of which I never tired, and whenever I return to the North-West, puddin’n’chips is always on the menu.

Every chip shop worth its salt and vinegar in the North-West served steak and kidney pudding, along with that other tasty treat, tripe, the much- maligned but extremely nutritious stomach of a cow. It might have the look and texture of a wet nappy, but tripe is a delight.

Empty most of a bottle of vinegar over a succulent slice of honeycomb or thick seam, and you have one of the greatest regional culinary treats that a nation can offer.

Most people tend to turn up their noses at tripe, without ever having tasted it, even though they are quite happy to eat l’escargot, eggs and the livers of force-fed geese, but they really don’t know what they are missing.

A Cumbrian uncle once physically retched when he saw me tucking into a plateful and declared: “We feed that to the hounds, not folk!”

I popped into a Tynedale chippy the other day, and was amazed at the cornucopia of offerings you could feast on, from delicacies from the shores of Far Cathay and the deepest quarters of the sub-continent, but there was no sign of steak and kidney pud.

It was the same when I lived briefly in the far North of Scotland, where my heart rose when I heard the freckled giant in front of me in the queue ask for a pudding supper, but rather than heading for the steamer, the proprietor went to a cabinet and fished out what looked an embarrassed policeman’s truncheon.

It turned out to be a delicacy called red pudding, a sort of sausage made from what appeared to be the sweepings of an abattoir, including bacon, beef, pork and pork rind. There was also white pudding – a bizarre type of oatmeal sausage – black pudding and the inevitable haggis, but in this panoply of puddings, there was none of the steak and kidney variety.

I opted for a Scotch pie instead, and when I eventually worked out that the string-vested custodian of the chip pan was asking if I wanted it heated, I was a little taken aback when he dropped it in the frier with the chips and Mars Bars.

I asked the genial proprietor of one Tynedale chippy why the North-East had turned its collective back on baby’s heads. He actually gave a delicate little shudder before pronouncing there was no demand for suet and offal in these parts.

“We do liver and onions though.” he said proudly, but I was already on my way out of the door.