Peter Brears, in his excellent book, ‘Traditional Food in Yorkshire’, cites a 19th Century source: W. Howitt, The Rural Life of England’ (1840). Howitt had written how local people in the Yorkshire Dales could make:
… in a wonderful short time … those delicious little kettle-cakes, or as they call them, sad-cakes, made of pastry thickly doted with currants.
These cakes, however, were certainly not just confined to Yorkshire, and similar recipes can be found across Northern England.
Ingredients
- 10 oz/280g plain flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- Pinch of salt
- 4 oz/113 g lard
- ¼ pint/150 ml/5 fl oz milk
- 1 oz/28 g each of sugar and currents
Method
- Sift the flour, baking powder and salt and rub in the lard.
- Mix in the milk and make a dough
- Divide the dough into three and form each into a round ball with a hole in the centre
- Fill with the mixed sugar and currants
- Cover over the hole with surrounding dough and roll out to ½ inch/ 1 cm thick. Cut into rounds.
- Bake at 200°C/400° F, gas mark 6, for 15-20 minutes.
16 Responses to Sad Cakes
Can I buy sad cakes in Burnley Lancashre
Chorley cakes are very similar, you can get them in Aldi.
Bury market has them and the little bakery up rosegrove
Oddies bakery used to sell them.
You can buy them in Long Preston corner shop. They are delicious.
They sell fab Eccles cakes at Truffles in Steyning, West Sussex. But I look forward to a Sad cake, one fine day. (I also recommend pattie and chips in Hull)🙂
Love the sad cakes my grandma used to make them
I’ve been informed by my mother they’re a traditional Rawtenstall (Lancashire) cake. Yorkshire indeed! 🤣
It could be said that where Yorkshire goes, Lancashire follows!
I was so excited to learn about Eccles cakes and sad cakes. They are a tradition in my family here in America. Our Great Grandmother, Elizabeth Clarke, brought this recipe and Yorkshire pudding with her when she moved her family to America to get her children out of the cotton mills. We always knew our cakes as sad cakes but in truth, they are made and look like Eccles cakes. We always wondered why they were called sad cakes when we were so happy eating them. I learned that the history of these cakes goes way back and some people have credited Elizabeth Raffald with inventing them, but I doubt that. They are so imbedded in English rural life and culture that I suspect they go back a very long way, and that she just put the recipe in her book. I grew up very English thanks to my Grandmother and Mother and we had tea time every day. They are gone now but I still hold on to their memory through these lovely cakes.
Thanks Demaris, for such a lovely memory of your family. Food is a great way of preserving these family memories and traditions and I am delighted to hear that traditional Yorkshire cooking has carved a well-deserved niche for itself in the USA!
That is so lovely to hear that you have your Great Grandma Clarke’s local recipes to carry on the tradition, Demaris. I have great memories of my Grandma making Sad Cakes (she never weighed anything but they always turned out perfect!) and me and my cousins lining up to eat them straight out of the oven. We were brought up in Nelson, Lancashire and we called them Lancashire Sad Cakes however my Grandma was from Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire so unsure where they truly originated from.
My mum always made sad cakes without fruit in and Eccles cakes with.
Parkin ( ginger cake) is wonderful too.
I have just made sad cakes with leftover pastry and fruit which was what my mother used to do. They are very much like Chorley cakes therefore more Lancastrian than Yorkshire!
The best ones I have ever had and buy regularly are from the cafe/ shop in Gisburn…yummy.They are rather large and rich,I can only eat half at a time !!
Oh, how I long for a Sad Cake. As a 13 year old school lad from Richmond Virginia, I enjoyed my first Sad Cake in 1956 while living in Colne. That same year my first Yorkshire pudding was at the Wilson Arms restaurant in Grassington. What cherished memories I have.