Eccles cakes

In the north-west of England, the town of Eccles lends its name to Eccles cakes. In the region, Eccles cakes aren’t exclusively eaten as a sweet pastry, but also alongside a chunk of Lancashire cheese. Chorley cakes are similar, although they are made with shortcrust pastry and not puff pastry like Banbury and Eccles cakes.

Mrs Raffald is one of the first to give a recipe for Eccles cakes in her book, The Experienced English Housekeeper from 1769, but the recipe does not yet bear the name ‘Eccles cakes’, and the filling also contains a small amount of meat, as was the case with the mince pies (see here) of the past.

In the year 1793, James Birch began to bake and sell Eccles cakes at his shop in today’s Church Street in Eccles. It is quite possible that he used Mrs Raffald’s recipe, omitting the meat. A few years later he opened a larger bakery across the street and a former employee started his own store at the old location, with a large inscription claiming that his shop, Bradburns, was the only original Eccles cake shop. Of course there was a feud, as the two Eccles cake shops were in the same street.

It’s likely that these cakes, or a version of them, were at one point baked as ‘Wakes cakes’ for the Eccles Wakes which celebrated the feast of St Mary and the town church. In 1877 the Home Secretary, at the request of the Eccles Local Board, banned the Wakes because they had become a riotous affair that had nothing more to do with the rush bearing traditions of the past where townspeople would gather to bring bunches of rushes to spread over the church floor.

On a postcard from around 1900 I found another Eccles cake shop and this shop also claimed to sell the one and only Eccles cakes. Yet it was Bradburns that survived the longest in the end – the shop was known until about 1953, but the building was demolished in the 1960s, in the same decade the Banbury cake shop was demolised. Why, oh why, were these shops not protected and preserved? Just like the Banbury cakes, there is one more company that, although no longer in Eccles itself, makes Eccles cakes based on a family recipe.

Bradburns and the other Eccles cake shops are now forgotten, but Birch Eccles cake shop is still remembered by a plaque on the wall in the village. The text reads that Eccles cakes from Birch were exported as far as the West Indies and Australia.