The Last Bite: Victorian Gingerbread That Tastes Nothing Like Greggs

Welcome back to The Last Bite, our column documenting the survival of traditional food establishments in a ramen-slurping, matcha latte-sipping, novelty cafe-obsessed world. As cities develop and dining habits change, can the dive bars and defiantly untrendy restaurants keep up? Here, we talk to longstanding bartenders, chefs, market stall holders, and restaurant owners to find out what the future may hold. For this instalment, we head to Cumbria and to find out how a bakery with a 160-year-old gingerbread recipe continues to draw customers—even when faced with with catastrophic flooding.

The Lake District's Grasmere is famous for two things: William Wordsworth and gingerbread.

Wordsworth predates the gingerbread, but only just. Grasmere Gingerbread was invented by Victorian cook Sarah Nelson in 1850, four years after the death of England's most famous Romantic poet. Today, the gingerbread is made from the same premises and with the same recipe, now owned by third-generation descendants Joanne and Andrew Hunter. The shop and bakery is currently run by manager Richard Street.

"It's not what not what you might have come to expect from gingerbread." Street tells me. "It's got the crunch of a biscuit but the doughiness of cake. People expect gingerbread to be like the hard stuff you get in Greggs—and are pleasantly surprised."

Grasmere Gingerbread is a strange hybrid that isn't quite as sweet as you would imagine, more pleasantly saccharine with a spicy kick of ginger. It breaks and crumbles but is chewy and a little fudgy in texture. The bakery sells its crumbly topping separately in small plastic bags.

"Hotels and cafes buy the crumbs in bulk and use it in crumbles and other recipes," Street explains. "Apparently there's a hotel that uses them in a gingerbread-themed burger."

Grasmere Gingerbread is also vegan and Street delights in telling those who follow a plant-based diet that no animal products are used.

"We also get a lot of kids that can't eat dairy and it's great watching their faces when they find out they can eat it," he says.

The recipe is a closely guarded secret. Ludicrously so. On visiting the shop and kitchen, I'm not allowed to even look at the room in which the gingerbread is mixed, permitted only to see where it's baked, cut, and wrapped. Only one person who knows the recipe, and that's the guy who cooks it.

It is not written down anywhere, except on the original parchment etched by Nelson herself. And where is that kept? I enquire.

"A bank vault in Ambleside," Street responds. Even he has no idea what the recipe is.

Somewhat incongruously, for someone made famous for something as whimsical as gingerbread, Nelson's life was a hard one. Born into a poor household, she spent her adolescent years working in the kitchens of aristocratic families. As a working class woman in the 19th century, upward mobility wasn't an option. Nelson married a divorced farmhand in 1852 and moved away from the Lake District, returning several years later after one of her children died of cholera.

Holding the relatively respectable position of housekeeper and cook in a local household, Nelson got more creative with her dishes and developed the recipe for Grasmere Gingerbread. She began selling it from a tabletop balanced across a tree stump to passersby, until the treat drummed up enough attention that she was able to afford a premises of her own. The building was attached to the local church, St. Oswald's, and is still there today.

"She literally worked herself to death." Street says, while showing me her grave that sits in the church graveyard, just 20 feet from the shop. "She died when she was 85 and she never stopped working."

The Grasmere Gingerbread kitchens and shop are tiny, with a cooking staff of just three, alongside the two women who work in the shop. The shop sells another famous local delicacy: Cumbrian rum butter.

"Is that recipe as closely guarded a secret?" I ask.

"No," says Street. "It's just made of sugar, butter, and rum."

Grasmere Gingerbread is built on tradition, from the century-old recipe to the women working in shop who dress in pinafores and bonnets. However, after being hit by floods at the beginning of the year, the shop had to action a slightly less traditional marketing plan.

"That was a river," Street says, pointing at the small, parochial lane the shop sits to the side of the shop. He then points at a small drain in front on the shop. "That was a whirlpool."

With visitors unable to access Grasmere Gingerbread, Street and his team were unable to generate revenue and forced to let go of two members of staff.

Pop-ups seemed antithetical to the business model but left with no other choice, Grasmere Gingerbread launched stalls at popular tourist spots across the Lake District. Later in the summer, they collaborated with a local ice cream maker, creating a gingerbread-infused dairy ice cream.

So far, it seems to be doing the trick. On my visit, the shop is in rude health, with a long queue spiraling out of the door.

"Come back," Richard calls as I leave, packs of fresh gingerbread and rum butter in hand, to go find somewhere to scoff them. "We've been here 100 years. We're not going anywhere now."

I might just take him up on that offer.