What are the true ingredients of a Bakewell tart?

Northerners take their puddings seriously: Eccles cakes from Manchester, sticky toffee pudding from Cartmel, and Bakewell tart from Derbyshire. These hyper local puddings have been adopted by sweet tooths all over the country, but woe betide anyone who tries to mess with their traditions. In this, Bakewell tart provides its own challenges: the locals call it a pudding, and many will argue that it should have a puff pastry base rather than the shortcrust that it tends to have elsewhere, and even feature custard rather than frangipane. And we also have to contend with another variety – those made famous by Mr Kipling, which use a cherry jam, and decorate with a thick layer of fondant icing and a glace cherry.

Bakewell’s origin story contains the two most important aspects of any origin story: a kitchen accident, and an extremely spurious factual basis. The legend goes that in 1860, a waitress in one of the town’s pubs, The White Horse, failed to follow her mistress’s instructions and, rather than making a strawberry jam tart, ended up with what we now call a Bakewell pudding. But history begs to differ, with claims to the tart predating the poor waitress’s mishap by a couple of decades as far afield as Scotland and Boston, Massachusetts, not to mention the fact that the supposed proprietress of the White Horse never actually existed. The earliest recipes call for puff pastry and candied peel, neither of which now form a part of that which we happily call a Bakewell tart.

But no matter: the search for authenticity is usually a tricky and fruitless one. As enjoyable as a good origin story is, the true joy of a pudding is in the eating – and often in the ways the recipe has adapted and changed in the hands of those who made it across the years.