In Bakewell you'll find a bakery on every street corner, each claiming they bake the one and only original Bakewell pudding that made the little Peak District town famous.
Who actually invented the Bakewell pudding? According to the most popular story, the Bakewell pudding originated around 1850 when the maid of the local Rutland Arms pub made a mistake when reading a recipe from her mistress, Anne Grieves, thus creating a new bake that they then baptized as Bakewell pudding. However, recipes for this pudding appear two decades earlier in two manuscript recipe books, and in print in “The Magazine of Domestic Cookery” published in 1836. In “Traditional Fare of England and Wales” from 1948, a recipe says that: “A Mr Stephen Blair gave £5 for this recipe at the hotel at Bakewell about 1835.”
