Eccles cake Eccles cake An Eccles cake is a small, round cake filled with currants and made from flaky pastry with butter, sometimes topped with demerara sugar. Eccles cakes are named after the English town of Eccles, historically part of Lancashire, but now classified as a town in the City of Salford, Greater Manchester. It is not known who invented the recipe, but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes commercially, which he sold from his shop at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary's Road, now Church Street, in the town centre in 1793.
Eccles, Greater Manchester this. A popular theory is that the word denoted the site of a building recognised by the Anglo-Saxons as a church and feature of the landscape. Eccles appears to have been such a village, and "Ecles" may be the likely source of the modern name. In Kenyon's "Origins of Lancashire" (1991), however, the author suggests that this may not be the case as there is not an exact correlation between "Eccles" place-names and pre-"Domesday" hundreds in south Lancashire. Pre-historic finds in the parish of Eccles include dugout boats found at Barton-upon-Irwell, an arrowhead, a spear and axes at Winton, which