WHO invented the currant mint pasty, I wonder?

My collection of old recipe books offers no clues, and unearthing this recipe did prove challenging and difficult with Google offering no joy either.

The schoolboy joke ''fly pasty or cemetery '' was once a custom Yorkshire bake from the old-fashioned farmhouses from years gone by.

But is the currant mint pasty a traditional Yorkshire bake? I think so, never having seen them sold or baked anywhere outside our borders.

So I'm crediting and bagging this recipe for us Yorkshire folks!

These old and treasured recipes happened because people had certain ingredients at hand to put together a sweet treat for the hard-working family.

The recipe will have been passed down through the families, rather than written in cookery books. It’s a sort of bake which has no measurement, a type of recipe best made intuitively.

I made quite a few of these pasties in my early baking career on an industrial level, but sadly today they seem to have vanished from our bakers’ shops and gone out of favour without a goodbye.

The local bakers who all made their own variations of this pasty have almost all gone now along with these regional and much-loved recipes.

I'm sure people who bought them debated who made the best currant mint pasty in town. My recipe came from one of the best bakers, W Day's Confectioners, where I made and baked them with pride as a young apprentice, selling them in quarters or half slices to the older generation for weekend treats.

Today people probably call the pasty a November Eccles cake or Chorley cake: you see a currant and mint pasty is rather like a pie/tart.

It does not rise and has a body to it you might find surprising, but feel free to play around with the pastry if you want too. I like the shortcrust version.

Remember not to have the filling too dry, soak the fruit in boiling water first and add the butter abundantly to the currants as you mix them with the mint and brown sugar.

I particularly love the bite of shortcrust and the soft sweetness of the currants when the pasty is at room temperature.

It makes me feel like I'm eating something forbidden when eating these simple, combinations of pure Yorkshire magic, which surprisingly do work well. The smell of fresh mint from my garden and the fruit from the oven is just sublime.

It makes me proud to be a traditional Yorkshire baker, and there is no doubt that Yorkshire is the land of cake, puddings and pasties, and this recipe must be kept alive for future generations of bakers!

• Baker Mike does his best to keep these Yorkshire baking traditions alive by showcasing olden days recipes in his regular Friend In Knead column in the Keighley News. If you have missed any of his previous articles and recipes, simply visit keighleynews.co.uk, click on What’s On then Food & Drink.