Next to the entrance into Grasmere village churchyard is an old house. It was once a schoolhouse but in 1854 Wilfred and Sarah Nelson moved in with their family of two daughters, and this became the home of Grasmere Gingerbread.
Sarah was at this time in her late-thirties, and had been employed in a number of wealthy homes in the kitchens. It was in one of these that she had experimented with her recipe for gingerbread and brought it to perfection.
During the second half of the nineteenth century not only did Lake District tourism grow in general terms but more specifically the flow of visitors to Grasmere increased enormously following the death of the poet William Wordsworth. The Wordsworth family graves became a place of literary pilgrimage, and for fifty years Sarah supplied a growing clientele with her unique gingerbread until she died in the early years of the twentieth century.
Today, more than one and a half centuries later, Grasmere Gingerbread is still made to Sarah Nelson’s original recipe, a closely guarded secret, and is sold from the same house by the entrance to Grasmere village churchyard to its many thousands of visitors every year. I suspect that Sarah, for all her belief in her unique formula, would have been astonished to know the number of countries in the world to which her gingerbread has travelled.
