Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

gache a speciality of the island of Guernsey, is a semi-sweet fruit bread (see tea breads and tea cakes) highly enriched with butter, milk, and eggs, sweetened with brown sugar, sultanas, and candied peel, and baked in a cake tin. If rich Guernsey milk and butter, with their characteristic yellow colour, are used, the gache is especially good. The earliest written recipes are of the 18th century; but it had been made for some time previously. The name ‘gache’ is also known in Normandy, where it applies both to a flat, plain bread and, in the Ille-et-Vilaine area, to a richer type similar to that made on Guernsey.