Grasmere Gingerbread

Sarah Nelson, a Victorian cook, invented her gingerbread in this village in 1854, and the shop that bears her claim — Sarah Nelson's Original Celebrated Grasmere Gingerbread — still bakes it daily in Church Cottage, the village schoolroom of 1630 where Wordsworth once taught. Joanne and Andrew Hunter are the third generation of their family to own it, and Andrew is, by the firm's own account, the only living person who knows the recipe, the handwritten original being kept in a bank vault — a piece of theatre the product then has to live up to, and does. Nineteen people work a shop the size of a parlour; the queue outside is the Lake District's most reliable weather.