 A freshly baked Eccles cake | |
| Alternative names | Squashed Fly Cake, Fly Cake, Fly Pie |
|---|---|
| Type | Cake |
| Place of origin | England |
| Region or state | Eccles, Greater Manchester |
| Main ingredients | Flaky pastry,butter,currants |
AnEccles cake is a small, roundpie, similar to aturnover, filled withcurrants and made fromflaky pastry with butter, sometimes topped withbrown sugar.
The Eccles cake is named after the English town ofEccles, which is in the historic county of Lancashire and in the ceremonial county of Greater Manchester. Eccles cakes are a Lancashire food tradition, with similar cakes being found in other parts of the County of Lancashire, and are traditionally eaten with Lancashire cheese.[citation needed]
It is not known who invented the recipe,[1] but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes commercially; he sold the cakes from his shop, at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary's Road, now Church Street, in the town centre, in 1793.[2] John Ayto states thatElizabeth Raffald was possibly the person who invented the Eccles Cake.[3]
The word cake is used in the older general sense of a "portion of bread containing additional ingredients" rather than the narrower meaning ofsweet, leavened baked good.[4]
Eccles cakes do not haveProtected Geographical Status, so may be manufactured anywhere and still labelled as "Eccles" cakes.[5]
TheChorley cake fromChorley is often seen as the most similar variant of the Eccles cake, however it is flatter, made withshortcrust pastry rather thanflaky pastry, and has no sugar topping.[6]
The Blackburn cake is named after the town ofBlackburn and is made with stewed apples in place of currants.[7]
In East Lancashire, a cake known as a "sad cake", can be found in theDarwen,Blackburn,Accrington,Burnley,Colne,Nelson,Padiham areas and throughout theRossendale area. Similar to the Chorley cake, the sad cake is often up to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, and is rolled thinner so that some of the currants show through the pastry.
TheBanbury cake is an oval cake fromBanbury,Oxfordshire, similarly filled with currants, but with added spices.[8]
The currants roll[9] in theCommonwealth Caribbean is a descendant of the Eccles cake. It is made into the shape of a roll similar to that ofrugelach with currants wrapped and rolled between flaky pastry layers.[10][11][12] A variation to the currants roll is the coconut roll (known inGuyana as salara[13] and inGrenada as turnovers[14]) where the currants are replaced by various colours of shreddedcoconut.
Australian company Arnotts baked a "Spicy Fruit Roll" loosely based on the Eccles cake.
