Romney's & Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread

Romney's & Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread
Here at Romney’s Kendal Mint Cake, we understand the importance of championing local business and how collaborations can highlight the good work being done by independent, family run companies in and around the Lake District. Local businesses don't only build a stronger economy — they also build a stronger community. Relationships between small businesses are important in creating a cohesive, welcoming community identity. We have been lucky enough to work with businesses who, like ourselves, have strong historical significance to their local area or who have been set up with the same core beliefs at their heart.
With this in mind we, thought it would be a good idea to bring some attention to a very famous Lake District business we supply our products to - Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread.
'Grasmere Gingerbread was invented in 1854 by Victorian creator cook Sarah Nelson who mixed and baked her spicy-sweet chewy concoction inside her neat Church Cottage home – now The Grasmere Gingerbread Shop – and sold it to villagers and visitors from a table top on a tree stump outside her front door.
 
Within a few years its reputation had reached nearly every corner of the country and with the advent of the steam railways tourists flocked to Grasmere to buy her succulent invention.

No-one knows when exactly but sometime in the winter of 1854 Sarah perfected a recipe for a new spicy-sweet sensation that she named simply Grasmere Gingerbread®.

Neither a biscuit nor a cake, but somewhere in between, no-one had ever tasted anything quite like it before! Whilst she did not at first give up her regular work at Dale Lodge, Sarah began selling slices of Grasmere Gingerbread wrapped in parchment to villagers and tourists outside her neat home.

Officially registered as ‘None Genuine Without Trademark’, the launch of Grasmere Gingerbread® coincided with the development and expansion of the railways and the boom in Victorian visitors to the Lake District.

As the reputation of Grasmere Gingerbread grew, largely by word-of-mouth and tourists taking it home to bigger towns and cities, Sarah became confident enough to leave Dale Lodge and pour her energies into her new venture. A bold move and one which would more or less dictate the mixing, baking, wrapping and selling pattern of Sarah’s arduous everyday life for the next fifty years.

One hundred and sixty-six years after the creation and launch of Grasmere Gingerbread, Sarah Nelson’s remarkable, unique legacy lives.

Her wonderful spicy-sweet cross between a biscuit and cake enjoys a worldwide following and it is still baked fresh every day to her original secret recipe inside her former home.' - Extract taken from Grasmere Gingerbread 'History' page. Read more here - https://www.grasmeregingerbread.co.uk/history/

“It is very important for smaller Cumbrian businesses to work together and during the summer months we supply several boxes of Kendal Mint Cake a week to The Grasmere Gingerbread Shop,” said John Baron, director of Romney’s Kendal Mint Cake. “We have hundreds of outlets throughout Cumbria but it is great to be sitting alongside Grasmere Gingerbread at the village shop. It attracts so many tourists every year and a lot of them will be walkers and climbers who like to pack a bar of Kendal Mint Cake.”

If you would like to learn more about Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread or try some of their world famous products, please visit - https://www.grasmeregingerbread.co.uk/

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