Culinary York: Kit Kat to Crude Food

A Kit Kat chocolate bar was among the items sealed in a time capsule and then buried in a ceremony to mark the completion of Goodricke College at York University's new Heslington East campus. The Kit Kat in question will be well past its best when the capsule is dug up in the twenty-second century.

Pupils from two local primary schools helped select the items that were included in the capsule. Other items included a passport, a Harry Potter book, a toothbrush and an iPod.

Elizabeth Heaps, the University's Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Estates and Strategic Projects, told the Yorkshire Post that: "We are grateful to the pupils at both schools for helping us with this project and for the wonderful ingenuity and imagination of their suggestions... Together with the items suggested by staff and students at the University, they paint a fascinating picture of life in and around York in 2009."

The capital of the White Rose County has a long and distinguished history of sweet - or 'candy' making. The city was synonymous in the past with Rowntrees and Terry's confectionery companies. Nestle acquired Rowntree plc in 1988. Nestle Rowntree is now the only major chocolate manufacturer in York, after Terry’s, another famous York name, closed its factory in city in 2005 - with the loss of 300 jobs.

Visitors to the city can learn more about the Rowntree family's connections with confectionery in York with the Best of York audio guide. The self guided tour begins in St Helen's Square and finishes outside York Minster and takes in the site of the Rowntree brothers' first sweet making factory in the nineteenth century. The Best of York tour can be downloaded from our website for £4.50.

Sightseers without the means to download the tour can hire it on a pre-loaded MP3 player from the city's two Tourist Information Centres, located at the De Grey Rooms and at the Railway Station. To hear an audio sample from the tour please click here.

The thirteenth annual York Food and Drink Festival begins on September 18th. The theme of this year's ten day festival, which will run across all of the festival's activities, is Crude Food. According to the Festival's website: "Crude can be natural or raw; it may be a strange shape or blemished, but still very tasty; it can be unadorned or simply prepared..."

The Festival organisers are committed to showcasing the best of Yorkshire produce.

One of the highlights of this year's festival are two walks called 'Fancy a Forage' on Wednesday, September 23rd, when participants will have the opportunity to discover which natural foodstuffs are safe to eat and which are not with Chris Bax, from Taste the Wild, in two separate tours of Rowntrees Park and the Riverside(10am - 1pm and 2pm - 5pm).

The picture above shows Bootham Bar in the foreground and York Minster in the background. I have included it because the city's professional soccer club, York City, used to play at Bootham Crescent, which was renamed the KitKat Crescent in 2005 after club officials signed a sponsorship deal with Nestlé, which enabled the confectionery giant to rename the ground. Many fans still refer to the ground by its original name.