The Wedding Cake: History and Meanings

Abstract

AN intelligent guess at the origins of the wedding cake might well suggest it to be a Victorian invention.' Jeaffreson, the best known Victorian authority, thought it to have ancient roots but to have been put into essentially 'modern' form by French confectioners arriving in England at the Restoration of 1660.2 In the absence of any detailed research, this latter view has continued to be echoed by popular writers to the present day. My own interest in the matter as an anthropologist arises from a concern with processes of interpreting. Elsewhere I have discussed the contemporary wedding cake and the kinds of meaning that may be attached to that-by those who make it, and cut it, and eat it, as well as by anthropological observers.3 This discussion sprang from an ethnographic study made in Glasgow in the early 1980s of people getting married.4 In trying to analyse current meanings it became clear that the interpretations that people sometimes make may influence change. The potential for this was dramatically displayed in one observed instance-highly unusual-in which a couple had rejected the possibility of having a cake for their wedding at all. They had 'discovered' that the pristine whiteiced cake was the bride herself, and the cutting of the cake, which is a matter of bride and groom jointly forcing a knife into its centre, was the loss of virginity. With such a meaning in mind they felt that they could not possibly go through the ritual. The details of this case need to be examined carefully to see what exactly was at issue-it had more to do with feminism and equality than with sexual modesty-but it is clear from it that even so familiar, general and rarely questioned a piece of ritual as this cutting, and the presence of a cake to be cut, are vulnerable to the discovery of meanings-or, to put it more carefully, they are vulnerable to the construction of meanings for them. Such construction of meaning is not general, but it does happen. I wanted to examine the part that it plays when it does occur in the development, modification and sometimes abandonment of cultural practices and of the objects which are involved in them. What, I came therefore to ask, is the history of the cake? The question turned out not to have been seriously considered for a hundred years, though an analogous question for the long-disappeared Twelfth Cake had recently led Henisch onto some of the same ground.5 The only ideas about the wedding cake itself which were in circulation seemed largely wrong. Though not a historian I was therefore necessarily drawn into the investigation of this rather minute point of cultural history, since it was essential to establish the course of developments before the place of meaning in that course could be tackled. A maze of lanes and byways unfamiliar to an anthropologist needed to be explored. The train of events revealed turned out to be interesting and intricate, and, with the exception of the part shared with the Twelfth Cake, not well known. This article therefore concentrates on outlining it. The cake has several strands of prehistory which are first considered very briefly, but the several alternatives to the cake which have appeared at various times, such as bride's pies, are not discussed here. Things called cakes have also been used in marriage festivities in a variety of less familiar ways, only one of which