Pontefract cake

History

No one knows exactly when liquorice farming began in England, but records from the 1500s show it was already being grown, likely in monastery gardens and on estates of the wealthy. In the 1600s, it thrived in places with alluvial soil on top of magnesian limestone, such as Surrey, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Yorkshire. William Camden’s 1607 Britannia mentions liquorice crops in Worksop and Pontefract.

By 1780, nearly all English liquorice was grown in Pontefract and around Godalming in Surrey. In Pontefract, people cultivated it in small plots behind their homes. A map from the 1648 Siege of Pontefract shows liquorice in garths on both sides of Micklegate, the road linking the Market Place to the castle.

During the 1700s, liquorice was used as medicine for people and horses. The Pontefract cake was almost certainly a black, portable lozenge meant for making “liquorish water.” It was stamped with the castle lodge emblem of Pontefract as a mark of quality. This trademark dates to 1612, when the initials GS appeared—thought to belong to local landowner Sir George Savile. Another die-stamp came into use around 1720.

Only in the 1800s did liquorice become widely used for sweets. In 1760, apothecary and chemist George Dunhill, also a liquorice grower, added sugar to the medicinal recipe. By the late 1800s, twelve firms making liquorice confectionery relied mostly on extract imported from Turkey.

Production and design

Originally, the sweets were embossed by hand with a stamp; workers known as 'cakers' could produce upwards of 30,000 per day. Now they are usually machinery formed. The embossed stamp was originally a stylised image of Pontefract Castle with a raven on the top bar, thought to have been in use for almost 400 years. When the first secret ballot in the United Kingdom was held in Pontefract on 15 August 1872, the ballot box was sealed using a Pontefract cake stamp from Frank Dunhill's factory showing a castle and an owl.

Literary references

In Elizabeth Gaskell's 1866 novel Wives and Daughters, Dr. Gibson explains to a major that the youngest apprentice is always tasked with making pills. He promises the boy will have free access to pomfret cakes and conserve of hips, plus a Sunday treat of tamarinds as a reward for his weekly pill-making work.

Did You Know?

• The original name Pomfret cake comes from the old Norman name for Pontefract.
• The word 'cake' is of Germanic origin, from the Germanic 'kakâ' (cook).
• In 2004, a 56-year-old woman was hospitalized after consuming about 200 g of Pontefract cakes daily, leading to dangerously low potassium levels.