19^th century

Bakewell Pudding

Imagine a pub in a quintessentially English village: you enter with an appetite and the special on the menu is a pudding named after that village. You just have to try it, don’t you? And so the Bakewell pudding rose to fame. Even though Wonders of the Peak, the first travel guide to the Peak District, was written by Charles Cotton in 1681, tourism reached a high in Victorian times, helped by the development of the railway and an increasing interest in geology. Victorians also came to ‘take the waters’ in the spa towns of Buxton, Matlock Bath and Bakewell.

Today, when visiting the Derbyshire village to which this pudding owes its name, you can’t ignore the many quaint-looking bakeries claiming to present the one true Bakewell pudding. Its heritage has intrigued me for years, so naturally when I first visited Bakewell, I needed to explore and also ask some questions in those Bakewell bakeries.

Recipes for this type of pudding pop up in cookery books and manuscripts as early as the 1830s, but there are a number of versions of this pud and it is not clear who first linked it with the little Peak District town. Most probably it was one of the inn landlords of which the legend speaks: it is said that the pudding was invented in the White Horse Inn (now the Rutland Arms) by a waitress called Ann Wheeldon who made a mistake while preparing a pudding from the recipe book of mistress Ann Greaves. Mrs Greaves’s great-great-great-grandson believes the pudding must have been created in the 1850s. This is, however, quite a few years later than other Bakewell pudding recipes and about the date of a manuscript recipe I have in my possession by a person from Oxfordshire, which is not at all in the north. This means that by the 1850s the pudding was already quite well known and so was the recipe. The Bakewell pudding also appears in American cookery books before the 1850s, but it seems the earliest in print comes from a book called The Magazine of Domestic Economy, printed in London in 1836.

One of the earliest manuscript recipes of a Bakewell pudding I could find is in the possession of food historian Ivan Day. It is written down as one of three Bakewell pudding recipes at around 1830. The author of the manuscript credits the recipe to a Mrs Anthony, Castle Hotel, Bakewell. The plot thickened when I found out, with the help of Mr Day’s research, that there were three recipes in a book called Traditional Fare of England and Wales, of which one had a note: ‘A Mr Stephen Blair gave £5 for this recipe at the hotel at Bakewell about 1835.’ I looked for the book, and found it, and the recipes are indeed there. It is nearly identical to Ivan Day’s recipe from Mrs Anthony, only Mr Blair gives the option of flavouring the filling with bitter almonds, which is still such a recognisable flavour in the Bakewell pud today.

Bakewell pudding

Line a dish with fine puff paste and spread over it a variety of preserves with strips of candied lemon peel. Then fill the dish with the following mixture – ½ lb. butter (clarified) ½ lb. castor sugar 10 yolks and 2 whites of eggs. Flavour with either bitter almonds, lemon, nutmeg or cinnamon. (These Ingredients to be well mixed, but not beaten up). Bake in a moderate oven. When cold grate white sugar over pudding.

A Mr. Stephen Blair gave £5 for this recipe at the hotel at Bakewell about 1835.

Traditional Fare of England and Wales, 1948

All of the 1830s recipes for Bakewell pudding are quite different in character, which makes it hard to define the ‘real’ Bakewell pudding. There are also very strong similarities with a Sweet-meat Pudding from Eliza Smith’s book The Compleat Housewife (1737). Some Bakewell puddings have a layer of jam, others have a layer of candied peel and preserves as in the sweet-meat pudding. Some use bitter almonds, others do not. It leads me to believe that the Bakewell pudding wasn’t a pudding invented in an inn in Bakewell, as the popular myth likes people to believe; it was an existing pudding that was renamed thus to attract customers in the nineteenth century. And because it became famous in that locality, it disappeared in the rest of the country, making it a regional dish.

The version with just a layer of jam is the one that the Bakewell bakeries adopted as the true recipe. But if you would like to taste the earlier sweet-meat pudding version, here it is. I use powdered raw sugar, as early recipes often ask for loaf sugar, powdered, and it works better indeed. If you have a heatproof plate that will go into your oven, use that instead of a pie dish, as I believe this was the original vessel used to bake this pudding.