Two sweets, two towns, and two completely different ideas about what a treat should be. Kendal Mint Cake is a cool, peppermint slab that has been carried up Everest and shoved into countless rucksacks since. Grasmere Gingerbread is a warm, crumbly square sold over a small counter beside a village churchyard, still made to a recipe that dates from 1854. Plenty of visitors meet both in the same afternoon. Here's how they compare, and how to eat them well.

The two-minute version

If you're short of time, this is the whole argument in four lines.

• Kendal Mint Cake — solid peppermint sugar, usually sold as a bar. Cool, sweet and bracing. No flour, no baking, no cake. Made for coat pockets and hillsides.
• Grasmere Gingerbread — a thin, crumbly, spiced square with a chewy middle. Baked, buttery, faintly fiery. Made for a plate and a pot of tea.
• Buy both. They aren't competing for the same moment. Mint cake is a walking food; gingerbread is a sitting-down food.
• Don't judge either on the first bite alone. Both change as you eat them, and both taste better at room temperature.

Kendal Mint Cake: sugar, peppermint and cold air

If the name has ever puzzled you, you're in good company. Kendal Mint Cake contains no cake at all. It is a boiled sugar tablet: sugar and glucose cooked together, flavoured with peppermint oil, poured out and left to set hard. That is more or less the entire recipe. What it lacks in ingredients it makes up for in character.

Where it came from

Kendal had a sweet-making trade long before any of today's brands existed, and more than one local family claims to have put the bar together in its familiar form. The story usually told places it in Kendal in the early twentieth century, named after the town rather than any tin. What nobody disputes is that the town embraced it, and that several Kendal firms have been making it ever since.

The mountaineering link is the part that stuck. Kendal Mint Cake travelled with early polar and Himalayan expeditions, and the 1953 British expedition to Everest carried it. It's widely reported that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ate a piece high on the mountain. The reason is practical rather than romantic: it is almost pure quick energy, it doesn't crumble in a pocket, and it doesn't mind the cold.

Texture and flavour

Pick up a bar and it feels heavier than it looks, like a small paving slab wrapped in paper. The first bite is firm, almost chalky, and then it collapses into cool grains that dissolve slowly on the tongue. The peppermint is not shy. If you like strong mint toothpaste, you'll be delighted; if you don't, start with a small piece rather than a whole bar.

There are three main versions to know. The white bar is the classic and the sweetest. The brown version uses unrefined sugar and tastes deeper, slightly less sugary, with a faint caramel edge. Chocolate-covered bars are for people who find the plain article a bit much — the chocolate softens the mint and makes it feel more like confectionery and less like fuel. All three are sold in Kendal and in shops across the county, usually near the till.

Grasmere Gingerbread: the green door by the churchyard

Sarah Nelson began selling gingerbread from Church Cottage in Grasmere in 1854, and the same small building — tucked between St Oswald's Church and the village centre — still sells it today. The recipe is a closely guarded family secret, and it has never been manufactured elsewhere. In summer the queue stretches along the wall; in winter you may have the little shop to yourself. Either way, you smell it before you see it.

Texture and flavour

This is not the dark, soft gingerbread loaf you might be expecting. Grasmere Gingerbread is thin, roughly the size of a small biscuit, sandy and crumbling on top, chewier underneath, with a middle that sits somewhere between a flapjack and a shortbread. It breaks cleanly rather than shattering.

Ginger leads, but it isn't harsh. There's treacle in there, and butter, and a warmth that hangs around in the mouth after the piece is gone. It's sweet without being cloying, which is why one square rarely turns out to be enough. Buy the small wrapped portions if you're only curious; buy a larger box if you're taking some home.

Side by side

• Flavour: mint cake is clean, cold and one-note, in a good way. Gingerbread is warm, spiced and layered.
• Texture: mint cake is hard then grainy and dissolving. Gingerbread is crumbly then chewy.
• Keeping: mint cake lasts for months in a cupboard. Gingerbread is at its best within a few days and dries out once opened.
• Portability: mint cake wins comfortably. A wrapped bar survives a rucksack, a glovebox and a rain shower.
• Sharing: gingerbread divides neatly into squares. Mint cake needs a firm snap or a knife, and produces a small shower of sugar crumbs.

How to eat them properly

1. Let both come to room temperature. Cold mint cake is jaw-achingly hard, and fridge-cold gingerbread loses most of its aroma.
2. Snap mint cake, don't bite the bar. Hold it in both hands and break off a piece; it gives way along a clean line and saves your teeth.
3. Drink something plain alongside. Mint cake is good with black coffee or plain tea, where the mint has room. Gingerbread wants a strong brew, or a glass of cold milk if you're eleven.
4. Crumble gingerbread over something. A broken square over vanilla ice cream, stewed apples or a bowl of porridge is a very good use for the crumbs at the bottom of the bag.
5. Take mint cake on the walk, not the gingerbread. Gingerbread in a rucksack pocket becomes a bag of crumbs by the second mile.

Buying, keeping and carrying

Kendal Mint Cake is easy to find: sweet shops, outdoor shops, newsagents and supermarkets across Cumbria stock it, and the long-established Kendal makers all sell from their own premises in the town. If you want the version with a bit more provenance, buy it in Kendal rather than at a motorway services, and check the label for the maker's name.

Grasmere Gingerbread is the opposite — one shop, one recipe. That means you either visit Grasmere or order it by post, and it means the queue is real. Going early in the morning or late in the afternoon helps. If you're buying it as a gift, keep it in its wrapper until you hand it over; once the paper is open, it starts to dry.

Both travel well in hand luggage and neither needs refrigeration. If you're packing gingerbread for a journey home, put it at the top of the bag rather than under a rucksack, and eat it within a few days of opening.

A short verdict for visitors

If you're in Cumbria for a day and can only manage one, ask yourself what you're doing next. Heading up a fell, catching a train or driving home? Take the mint cake — a bar in the glovebox is a small, dependable pleasure, and it will still be good next month.

Sitting down somewhere with a view, a kettle and an hour to spare? Take the gingerbread. Buy a box rather than a single square, because the first one tells you nothing and the third one tells you everything.

The honest answer, of course, is that these two sweets have been sharing shelf space in Cumbrian shops for well over a century without anyone feeling the need to choose. Buy a bar of each, eat the gingerbread while it's fresh, and keep the mint cake for the walk home.

Photo: ivabalk / Pixabay