A look at a timeline of cake history across America starting in 1850 with Boston Cream Pie and finishing in 1981 with the Smith Island Cake.
How many different types of cakes do you know? In this article, we have put together a list of 15 varieties of cake names with pictures.
Every wondered about the history of cake? Learn some fun facts about different types of cake and where they came from in this week's infographic.
The following information is compiled by different resources and friends who have shared their information from years of experience and expertise. If you have any information to add or share, plea…
Delving into the true history of our foods is always much more rewarding than blindly accepting the tired old clichés and myths that are often used to explain their origins. I have already in two earlier postings tried to unravel the complex history of the popular Battenburg Cake, but the more I look at this subject, the more puzzling it becomes. A popular theory about its origin tells us it was made to celebrate an important Victorian royal wedding in 1884. In a 2003 newspaper article, food historian Catherine Brown tells us, 'But there was nothing to compare with the German pastry cooks' sophisticated use of marzipan, colours, shapes, flavours and allegorical designs. The British were impressed. They tried their hand at the German techniques and some native pastry cooks became almost as good as the Germans. Such was their confidence that when Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, married Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884, it was decided that a celebration cake was required, in their own design of course, but appropriately German in style to celebrate the marriage. What else to call it but a Battenberg cake? It was to be unique: a cake to stun British cake-lovers. They took inspiration from the German rococo style of architecture which featured gold (marzipan) with pastel colours (pink and yellow sponge).'* This all sounds plausible, but Brown does not inform us of her sources. I would love to know who it was who decided that a celebration cake was required. Until Catherine Brown can point out the primary sources for these statements, I am inclined to believe that she is simply repeating a popular anecdote which appears to have surfaced fairly recently and has no basis in fact. In a recent Great British Bake Off programme, the television historian Kate Williams repeated the same myth. My good friend Robin Weir, knowing my interest in the Battenburg, was amazed to recently come across an illustrated recipe for an identical cake called Gateau à la Domino in a July 1898 edition of the Victorian food and housekeeping magazine The Table, published and edited by the remarkable Mrs Agnes Berthe Marshall. Although Mrs Marshall's four books on cookery and ice cream are now fairly well known, The Table is rarely cited, though it is one of the most extensive and richest sources on the domestic life and food of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She launched it on 12th June 1886. There were 1690 weekly issues until June 1918. It was then renamed The Table and Housekeeper's Journal and was published fortnightly with 547 issues until its demise in September 1939. In its day The Table was the most important food magazine published in Britain. Mrs Marshall died in 1905, but The Table went on and on. Mrs Marshall's recipe for Domino Cake appeared in 1898, the same year in which recipes for two almost identical cakes - Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake and Robert Well's Neapolitan Roll were published. In appearance, Vine's cake is identical to Marshall's with nine panes of alternate pink and white genoese enclosed in an overcoat of almond paste. Well's cake on the other hand, with its four panes is closer to the modern version that we call Battenburg Cake today. If you have not read my earlier posts on this subject, here are some images to show you what these three cakes looked like. Mrs Marshall's Gateau à la Domino from The Table, July 2nd 1898 Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake from Saleable Shop Goods 1898 - nine panels Wells does not illustrate his cake. so I made his Neapolitan Roll from the recipe he published in Cakes and Buns (1898). Unlike Marshall's and Vine's versions, Well's cake was dusted with pink desiccated coconut and has only four panes. It may be that there are other recipes. I have not had a chance to look through the late nineteenth century numbers of the trade magazine The British Baker and Confectioner, which was edited by Vine, so the jury is still out as to who first devised the recipe. To me however one thing is sure, that the myth about the cake having four sections to commemorate the four Battenburg princes is total rubbish. And I am also now very sceptical about the unsubstantiated claim that this cake was originally invented to commemorate the wedding in 1884 of Prince Louis of Battenburg to Princess Victoria. If this was so, why does Mrs Marshall twelve years after the wedding call it a Domino Cake and Wells a Neapolitan Roll? Below is Mrs Marshall's full recipe, published here courtesy of Robin Weir, who is Britain's leading authority on this remarkable lady. I have a nagging suspicion that Mrs Marshall may have invented the cake, but cannot prove it. With its vanilla and maraschino flavoured almond paste, her version is more sophisticated than either Vine's or Well's, whose simpler recipes were designed for the trade rather than the domestic cake maker. She also copyrighted her recipe - see below - and declared that it was new. Perhaps the other two pinched it and renamed it in order to disguise their source. So to take a terrible liberty with Gertrude Stein's well known phrase relating to a well known flower, "A domino cake, is a Neapolitan roll, is a Battenburg cake.' Domino Cakes were normally small rectangles of genoese decorated with icing in the form of dominoes, as No. 4 in this fine chromolithograph by Kronheim from Mary Jewry, Warne's Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book (London: 1868). What is overlooked in all the Battenburg Cake myths is that there were actually two weddings between English princesses and Battenburg princes. The first was that of Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's grandaughter, to Louis of Battenburg in 1884. The second took place the following year, when Louis's brother Henry married Queen Victoria's youngest child Beatrice. The bride cake illustrated above is that presented to Henry and Beatrice at their wedding in 1885. When they cut this remarkable cake, I wonder if there was a pattern of red-white-red-white running all the way through it. *Catherine Brown, Battenberg Cake; A celebration confection fit to grace a royal wedding. The Herald, March 29th 2003. Read my other two posts on Battenburg Cake - Battenburg Cake - the Truth Battenburg Cake Revisited and Neapolitan Roll Rediscovered
Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is a very popular dessert now, but as you may imagine, adding vegetables to cake was done out of necessity, not choice.
It's been around since the 1800s.
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Some Background on the Ball Supper in the BBC2 Documentary Although the silver and other tableware here is accurate for the period, this is more of an 'evocation', than a recreation of the Netherfield ball supper. But hopefully it does offer some insight into the sophistication of dining in the Regency period. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. ©Optomen Television Those of you who regularly read this blog will know that I am frequently rather harsh about the lack of accuracy in food and table settings in period movies and television dramas. Rarely have I seen any recreations of this kind that have really impressed me. Though of course I constantly have to remind myself that these productions are not pretending to be anything more than dramatised settings of fiction, so the food and table setup are props for the cast to perform around. Therefore I suppose it is a bit sad of me to look for detailed historical accuracy in a fictional context where it is unlikely to be found. However, when the format of the production is a documentary, a medium which attempts a true reflection of reality, it is a different matter. On British television in recent years, there have been a number of documentaries which have attempted to examine the history of our food. In most cases these recreations have been worse than those of the period dramas. I am not going to give any examples, but some of these productions have really been wasted opportunities and I have frequently been embarrassed by my own involvement in them when I see the final edit. I believe that a more intelligent approach to food in history has the potential for really exciting - and yes, even more entertaining television than risk-averse commissioning editors realise. So how you might ask, can this sort of thing be done in a more revelatory and accurate way? Well the first essential factor is to work with a production team who really listen and understand these issues. When I was first invited to create the food and table for BBC2's documentary Pride and Prejudice Having a Ball, I had an exploratory meeting with the producer/director Ian Denyer. For the first time in my long career, I found myself talking to a television professional who was singing from the same hymn sheet as myself. Ian and his colleague Sarah Durdin Robertson were really keen to portray the same level of historical accuracy in their production that I aim for in my museum exhibitions. They too wanted to avoid the tabloid 'Carry on Banqueting' approach that has too often been the standard fare when it comes to the treatment of food history on British television. Silver specialist Christopher Hartop and his wife Juliet with a practice layout of the Regency silver at three o clock in the afternoon on the filming day. Ten hours later, they were still up, washing all this incredible stuff in the kitchen sink until 4.00am in the morning! Christopher and Juliet organise decorative arts special events, including one called The Art of Dining. Find out more at Christopher's website. The second essential factor is to set the table with authentic equipage rather than the generic art department 'props' that appear in just about every production, even the big budget Hollywood ones. To make this possible I called upon the good offices of my friend and colleague Christopher Hartop, one of the world's leading scholars of historic silverware. Christopher miraculously sourced a large assemblage of authentic Regency tableware, making this production the very first to recreate a period table on British television with a high degree of veracity. The only disappointment was that the food could not be prepared in a period kitchen, though I made up for this in using a range of original equipment, especially in the preparation of some of the sweet dishes. Confections from the Netherfield dessert you will have missed if you blinked when watching the programme! All designed for consuming with sweet wines. The Prince of Wales biscuits in the foreground, emblazoned with the iconic feathers emblem of the Regent, were made from Joseph Bell's 1817 recipe. The pink sweets are Pistachio Prawlongs from Frederick Nutt's 1789 The Complete Confectioner, a key work of this period. The plate in the background contains spice biscuits, wafers, sweetmeat biscuits, toad in a hole biscuits, millefruit biscuits and filbert biscuits, all also made from Nutt's recipes. Nowadays, we dunk biscuits into tea, but at this period they were used for dipping into the unctuously sweet wines of the dessert course. Ian told me the aim of the programme was to accurately recreate the Netherfield ball from Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, including the production and serving of the ball supper, which would be my job. In her beautifully measured, but succinct prose, the author offers just a few clues about the nature of this meal, leaving much to the reader's imagination. But if our twenty-first century imaginations have been nourished by cliché-ridden, stereotypical concepts of what food and dining was like in the late Georgian period, how can a modern reader visualise such an occasion? Austen tells us it was a sit-down affair, at which the ubiquitous 'white soup' was served. But she says little else about the nature of the rest of the food. So if we were to accurately recreate her ball supper, where should we look for research material? There are certainly many contemporary reports of grand balls in the newspapers of this period, in which suppers are described, though hardly ever in any significant detail. One thing we do learn from these sources is that the supper was usually served in the early hours of the morning, making the old cliché 'carriages at midnight' completely false. For instance at the Duchess of Bedford’s Ball at Bedford House in London on Friday 31st May 1811, at which the great Neil Gow provided the music, the supper furnished by James Gunter was served in the 'wee small hours', 'At half-past three o’clock the company sat down to a sumptuous banquet, the viands and wines being of the first description, with a desert of ices, strawberries, cherries, and grapes by Mr Gunter. Music was provided by Mr Gow’s Band'. The Morning Post of 14th April 1813, the year of our recreated ball, reported a very grand supper served at a magnificent ball in the home of a Mrs Beaumont, 'At 2 am the company then adjourned to the supper-tables. Here a most sumptuous display indeed was made, there were no less than six supper-rooms, all fitted-up in the most beautiful and appropriate manner. Each table was brilliantly ornamented with trophies of war and peace; emblems emblematic of the arts and sciences: the costume of all civilized nations of the earth, exemplified in waxen images, modelled for this fete expressly…the plate, and the china, displayed and the brilliancy of the lighting-up of the tables, the effect was grand in the extreme. To render the coup l’oeil complete, about two hundred beautiful women (for the major part of the females were really beautiful) sat in such prominent situations as to be seen in every part without the least difficulty. The supper, we need not add, was most excellent; the wines abundant, and all of the rarest kinds. The dessert fruits, and confectionary, were equally deserving of panegyric: the Duke of Clarence spoke in raptures of them'. This brief page on ball suppers from John Conrade Cooke's Cookery and Confectionery, (London: 1824) tells us that by this time it had become fashionable to eat the food provided at balls standing up. Austen tells us that the Netherfield supper was a sit down affair. Of course, the style of dining she had in mind was that of the late 1790s when she wrote the book, not the Regency period when it was published. I would have preferred to have produced a 1798 supper, but the BBC wanted to set it in 1813. Note that Cooke mentions 'White Soups'. He also tells us that the hams were ornamented or served in slices. Stand-up ball suppers became the norm in the Victorian period. This is a museum display I undertook last year of a stand-up ball supper based on an actual event at Hatfield House in 1845. It was part of the 2012 Bowes Museum exhibition Feast your Eyes. Amazingly, when my team did finally recreate the supper for filming at Chawton House in January, because the schedule was running very late, the food was not delivered to the table until 2 am. And we finished the washing up at 4.00 am. That day we started work in the kitchen at 7.00 am, making it a massive twenty-three hour shift! This sort of schedule was probably exactly the long kind of day that the servants who prepared and served at these affairs would have experienced in the Regency period. Creating a meal on this scale would have been the job of a large team of professionals over a number of days. Confectionery keeps well, so it was made well in advance. A lot of the cold dishes and pies were usually made the day before. This was the pattern we followed. My team was truly remarkable, working under extremely difficult conditions and for very long hours. Lesley Sendall, food stylist extraordinaire, was my second in command. In the kitchen, the meat and fish cookery was carried out faultlessly by the highly talented chefs Sylvain Jamois and Chris Gates, assisted by the always calm Emily Hallett and Roy May. I wish that I could have worked with them in a real period kitchen, like my own in Cumbria, teaching them how to roast in front of a fire and prepare their sauces on a stewing stove. In the dining room, Christopher Hartop and his wife Juliet laid out the remarkable silver and trained the waiters. Christopher, a former Executive Vice-Chairnan of Christie's is the author of numerous books and papers on silver. We all learnt a great deal about the logistics of such an ambitious entertainment, including the long hours of washing up afterwards in the small hours. Though unlike the scullery staff of 1813, we had good washing up liquid rather than hard soap and plenty of hot water - though that failed at one point! In the description above of Mrs Beaumont's ball, it is mentioned that the tables were decorated with emblematic wax ornaments. These pieces montées, or 'dressed plates' were also made out of sugar and edible materials. They were designed and made by very skilful confectioners who specialised in such work, and could even be hired just for the evening. One little known, but important book by the cook and confectioner John Conrade Cooke - Cookery and Confectionery (London: 1824) illustrates some of these extraordinary objects. The example I reproduce below was a sort of culinary 'mobile' that trembled elegantly when the guests sat at the table. It was appropriately called a 'tremblent'. These stunning wobbly centrepieces were popular all over Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century. They would have picked up and amplified every movement from the dance floor. A 'drest plate' or tremblent by John Conrade Cooke. Although there was neither time, nor the budget to make table ornaments like this for the programme, I did make two of Cooke's ices for our reconstruction of the Netherfield ball supper - tamarind ice cream and negus ice, both served during the dessert in contemporary ice coolers, or seaux à glace. A remarkable design for a tremblent by the Turin confectioner Prati to be entirely executed in sugar paste c.1825. Bills of fare for ball suppers are actually few and far between in the cookery literature of the period. One of the best examples and the one we decided to use as the starting point for our supper was published in later editions of William Henderson's The Housekeeper's Instructor. It first appeared in the 1805 edition, a version of the book much 'corrected, revised and augmented' by Jacob Schnebbelie, principal cook at that iconic residence for high status bachelors - Albany in Piccadilly. Portrait of Schnebbelie with the Albany from William Henderson, The Housekeeper's Instructor (Twelfth Edition, London: 1803). It is likely that Schnebbelie fed such regency worthies as Henry Holland, Lord Byron and Robert Smirke, who all lived in chambers or 'sets' in the Albany on his watch. Schnebbelie's scheme includes four dress plates down the middle of the table with a small dessert frame in the centre. These raised frames, also called plateaux or surtout were very popular for raising dramatic ornamental centrepieces above the level of the table. With four dress plates and a frame, this layout is for a very ambitious entertainment indeed - to my mind, in style and scope somewhat more Mr Darcy or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, than Mr Bingley. On either side of the frame is a Savoy cake. These large moulded sponge cakes were decorated with gum paste ornaments and made conspicuous ornaments for the table in their own right. I decided to drop the dress plates. but retain the savoy cakes. Schnebbelie's ball supper scheme, with its 'frame' and 'dress plates' is for a very grand ball supper. He also included a plan for the dessert which followed. From William Henderson, The Housekeeper's Instructor (Twelfth Edition, London: 1803). This large gum paste triumphal arch with its trophies stands on a dessert frame or plateau. I made it for the exhibition Royal Sugar Sculpture in 2003. It is now displayed in the table decker's room at Brighton Pavilion. In this decorative title page to Cooke's book, the two little fellows at the table are preparing a 'drest plate'. The items on this 1870s French ball supper buffet include pieces montées and trophies of game and fish. One of my ornamented Savoy cakes. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. © Optomen Television A Regency period mould in my collection, which I used to ornament the Savoy cake above. Ball suppers were prepared and served by professional caterers with advanced skills in both cookery and confectionery. Schnebbelie includes two blancmanges in his scheme, which were likely to have been made in the intricate moulds of the period. The mould used to make this beautiful blancmange basket of fruit was made by Wedgewood in the 1790s. Photo by Sarah Durdin Robertson. Schnebbelie's cold fowls were likely to have been ornamented with fashionable silver hatelet skewers garnished with such delicacies as whole truffles and crayfish. Note the slices of ham on the napkin in the silver basket, served as per the instructions of John Conrade Cooke reproduced earlier in this post. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. © Optomen Television. Instead of a dessert frame, we used a stunning epergne by Benjamin Smith III of Birmingham, kindly lent by Koopman Rare Art. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. © Optomen Television The table is laid à la française with all the dishes on the table at once. The guests choose just the dishes they want and help each other, making it a socially dynamic style of dining. The aim was to provide a sumptuous arrangement that honoured the guests with plenty of choice. Nobody was expected to eat everything. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. © Optomen Television Many of the savoury dishes in the meal were from Henderson's book, though some, such as the Austen favourites white soup and haricot of mutton were based on recipes in Martha Lloyd's and the Knight family manuscripts, housed at the Jane Austen House and Chawton. However, most of the recipes in these wonderful collections are of a domestic nature. Much grander dishes would have graced the table of the fashionable and aspirational Bingleys, especially at an entertainment at which they were attempting to impress grandees such as Darcy. Crayfish in Jelly. Photo by Andrew Hayes Watkins. © Optomen Television. The recipe for the dish above. From Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery (London: 1788). A sweet jelly this time, moulded in cameo style made using a 1790s Staffordshire mould. This is the final bill of fare for the supper. Its core is the 1805 arrangement designed by Schnebbelie reproduced above, but with the addition of two soups and a number of other dishes mentioned by Austen, such as haricot of mutton roast widgeon and ragout of veal. There was also a dessert course, which I will discuss in a later post. Ivan enjoys a cup of tea after the stress of unmoulding this 1790s Staffordshire core jelly obelisk. It was worth it as it did appear on the screen for a micro-second! A lot of you who have already watched the programme and have contacted me to say that you would have liked to have heard more about the food. Well, the supper was just a part of the whole event and what had to be foremost in the narrative of the programme was how the context of the ball set the dynamics of Austen's plot. I thought the programme makers and presenters made a good job of this. The extraordinary culture of Regency dining really needs a six part series of its own. Though I am afraid that commissioning editors think that modern audiences do not have an appetite for this sort of thing. They are entirely wrong of course! Some of the sharp-eyed among you noticed a few errors of fact in the voice-overs in food scenes. Alistair Sooke said that the parmesan ice cream was made from a recipe in Frederick Nutt's Imperial and Royal Cook, which of course does not contain any ice cream recipes. It was made from Nutt's earlier work, The Complete Confectioner of 1789. Well spotted! Three of you realised that the liquid unfortunately described by Amanda Vickery as a 'gallon of gravy', must have been the hare soup, because it was being poured into a particularly fine Regency soup tureen. It was! The other tureen was used for serving the famous white soup. And yes, the meat in a veal ragout was not 'slow roasted', nor shredded - it was stewed. I am never sure who writes the texts of voice-overs, but in my experience they are the area in these productions where the most errors creep in. It can be particularly annoying when an expert contributor has mentioned on camera the true facts and in the presenter's voice-over which replaces it, the truth gets mangled, or ends up substituted by some nonsense gleaned from Wikipedia. It happens to me all the time - but I guess that is one of the joys of show biz! Although my meal was set out correctly for this period, the mode with which it was consumed in the programme by the modern diners would have raised a few eyebrows in the early nineteenth century. Place a group of excited twenty-first century dancers round a lavish table at 2.00am in the morning and you will not get a perfect demonstration of Regency period manners. À la française dining was a socially dynamic mode of service, but not quite the free-for-all depicted here. If you live in Britain and you missed the programme first broadcast at 9.00pm on the 10th May on BBC2, you can catch up with it over the next week on BBC iPlayer. It is presented by Amanda Vickery and Alistair Sooke. It is an Optomen production for BBC2 commissioned by BBC2 Controller Janice Hadlow and Mark Bell, Commissioning Editor, Arts. P.S. Neither Optomen or the BBC told me anything about this, but a friend has just pointed out that there is another spin-off programme from Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball, an education production aimed at school children called Regency Life: 3 Lives in a Day. She mentioned it to me, because she noticed lots of sections with really good footage of my food and table, which were not used in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball. I appear in it from time as an uncredited, disembodied pair of hands doing things with food! If you want to watch it, it is available on BBC iPlayer for a few more days - Regency Life: 3 Lives in a Day Watch Ivan make Frederick Nutt's 1789 Spice Biscuits
Illustration by C.F. Plummerey c1835
A selection of beautiful art history inspired birthday cakes to satisfy not only the appetite but also the eyes of art lovers.
A Twelfth Cake as not seen on TV! Recently I have watched a lot on British television (and heard even more on the radio) about Twelfth Night, the so-called last day of Christmas. But according to the liturgical calendar, the ecclesiastical season of Christmas doesn't actually end until Candlemas, the 2nd of February, a celebratory period of not twelve, but forty days. So with this in mind, and the fact that it is the 8th of January today, I guess it is still not too late for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and apologise for my lack of communication this past year. That's my excuse anyway! One old food custom here in the English Lake District which marked out this forty-day season was to eat 'sweet pie' for Christmas morning breakfast. This Cumberland variant on the mince pie contained mutton as well as dried fruit, spices and sugar and was the first flesh meal after the vigil of Christmas Eve, originally a day of abstinence from meat. Even during my lifetime, there were local farming families who saved a small piece of the Christmas breakfast pie in the larder to be consumed forty days later on Candlemas Day. A reclusive old Georgian shepherd called Richard Nicholson, who lived on a windswept mountain called Black Combe in the parish of Whitbeck, used to kill a sheep every year to make his sweet pies. In his History of Cumberland, the antiquarian William Hutchinson (1794) gives a long account of this eccentric man and his superstitious beliefs, which includes this passage, Wilkinson and his neighbours were so superstitious that they believed that the oxen and other animals in the byres and stalls all genuflected on Christmas Eve when the clock struck twelve! Detail of a Twelfth Cake mould signed by James Gunter. Anyway, back to the British television programme I hinted at earlier, which featured Twelfth Day celebrations. It was a fun Christmas edition of a production called The Victorian Bakers. It, like the original three-part version screened last year, was full of interesting facts about professional bakers in the nineteenth century. But for me it held one terrible disappointment - the quality of the food that the bakers produced. If you watched the programme, please do not believe that what you saw was really anything like the food of the nineteenth century. I sometimes had to hold my hands over my eyes and frequently wanted to roll my sleeves up to show them how to do it properly. However. this was not the fault of the bakers themselves, who were all modern professionals with incredible contemporary skills. I guess the TV company wanted them to 'bring the period back to life' through discovering the difficulties and making lots of mistakes on the way. The whole thing reminded me a bit of a food history series from a number of years ago called Supersizers. I was the "historical advisor" to that series, but the producers rarely took my advice. And although the series was highly entertaining, the food cooked by modern culinary professionals was absolutely awful, with an emphasis on offal, cods head and other dishes chosen for their shock value. As is the wont of these 'living history' productions, the Victorian Bakers also featured lashings of tripe, tongue etc. to shock our modern squeamish sensibilities (yawn!). But what was missing were the incredible skills (now mainly lost) that Victorian bakers and confectioners possessed. I prefer to celebrate those. However, I have a confession to make. The makers of the programme did ask me to teach the bakers to decorate some twelfth cakes, but the scene we eventually filmed was not used in the final cut. I was asked to make and decorate a twelfth cake to show them the skill level, but also to teach two of the bakers to decorate one themselves. We had a great day and I think they learnt quite a lot. But what made the session very special was that I let them have a go at using some of my precious confectioner's moulds to make their cake really true to period. In fact we used moulds carved by the greatest twelfth cake decorator of all, the London based Italian confectioner William Jarrin, which was I suppose a bit like letting a modern art student use Rembrandt's actual paintbrushes. As you can see, the king and queen mould above came from the celebrated confectionery shop belonging to the Gunter family, for whom Jarrin worked as an ornament maker for a few years after the battle of Waterloo, In later life, Jarrin was paid by Lord Mansfield to travel from London to Scone Palace in Scotland to decorate a special shortbread for a visit of Queen Victoria. That always seems a bit bizarre to me - an Italian confectioner going to Scotland to decorate a shortbread! For me, it is an incredible privilege to own and to be able to use moulds carved by this nineteenth century master. I wish the BBC had also appreciated this. Anyway, to return to the Victorian Bakers. I was commissioned by the production company to make the cake at the top of this page with its neo-gothic gum-paste decorations, while the two bakers had a go at ornamenting the one below, using some of Jarrin's moulds. Harpreet Baura-Singh, who makes high-class contemporary cakes for a living, particularly took to the challenging task of pressing gum paste from these extraordinary moulds. Both cakes were iced with a base of pink cochineal icing as per the instructions of a number of the early authorities. The other baker, John Foster confessed that he would rather have spent his time with me making some traditional pies. Some of the other bakers did have a go at making a pie on the programme - a gargantuan Yorkshire Christmas Pie, very loosely based on a recipe in Francatelli. But the less I say about how it turned out, the better - though I suspect Mr Francatelli may be rotating rapidly in his grave. And I am not going to say too much either about the gingerbreads and moulded Christmas pudding, which would have worked much better if the bakers had been taught to use the kit properly. Anyway, this is what the twelfth cakes looked like, because sadly they did not make it to the final edit. Twelfth cake ornamented by Harpreet Baura-Singh and John Foster, with a little help from William Jarrin and Ivan Day A much more satisfying pre-Christmas project was a feature I worked on on the subject of English Christmas traditions for the popular Japanese magazine RSVP. This was written by Kirstie Sobue with some stunning photos of the dishes by her husband Hideyuki. The article was eighteen pages long and profusely illustrated. Here is a selection of the dishes below, which as you can see did include another twelfth cake specially made for the feature.Another memorable and fun moment at the tailend of my year was feeding Edward Stourton a bowl of plum potage for the Radio 4 programme Sunday, which was broadcast on Christmas morning. When Edward saw the dark brown mess before him, he did not look impressed, but after tasting it declared that it was delicious. I have put one of Hideyuki's photos of the potage at the end of this post. I hope you all enjoy the twenty-five remaining days of Christmas. I will actually be in Detroit on Candlemas Day to give a couple of workshops and a public lecture at the wonderful exhibition The Edible Monument, so if any of you are there and are feeling hungry, I will share a piece of my forty-day-old sweet pie with you, that is if immigration allow me to bring it into the US. Merry Christmas! My kitchen at Christmas. Photo - Hideyuki Sobue, Another twelfth cake, this time for the Japanese magazine RSVP. Note the crowns on cushions. Photo - Hideyuki Sobue This lucky slice contained the bean, so he who gets the bean gets the crown. One of the oldest of all British Christmas traditions - plum pottage. Photo - Hideyuki Sobue
Queen's Cake, a dense buttery pound cake studded with currants and bursting with citrus flavor, is one of Colonial Williamsburg's most popular desserts!
“the King of Chefs, and the Chef of Kings” “When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gathering,…
A comprehensive history of cake and how it became one of the favorite artistic symbols of our jaded generation.
Food History Jottings' Twelfth Cake for 2012 Every year I make a Twelfth Cake, which I ornament with gum paste motifs printed from original eighteenth and nineteenth century moulds. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to find a lovely boxwood confectioner's mould designed for making the components of a crown. This has enabled me to embellish my cakes with a couple of beautiful sugar crowns in the manner of the period. This year I have decorated my cake with motifs from the Regency - the Prince of Wales feathers, the rose of England, the thistle of Scotland and the shamrock of Ireland. The background icing is coloured with cochineal, which according to the evidence seems to have been fairly usual. Although it looks like something from Barbara Cartland's boudoir, this colour sets off the pure white gum paste perfectly. This particular cake is going to be raffled to support the appeal to purchase Rose Castle in Cumbria (see previous posting). It is displayed at Dalemain House near Penrith. Every year I run a course called A Taste of Christmas Past, on which I teach my students how to make and decorate a Twelfth Cake using period techniques. We bake the yeast leavened cake in a wooden hoop or garth and everybody gets the chance to learn the difficult techniques of making gum paste sprigs. To find out more visit the Twelfth Cake page on my website. This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.
It's funny how some people end up making a mark on history for a seemingly trivial thing. The name Mrs. Beeton has become synonymous wi...
Saint Mark Cake (12th Century Recipe): Saint Mark cake is one of the most popular traditional cakes from Spain. It was first made in the 12th century in the convent of Saint Mark in León (Spain). The convent was founded by the queen Sancha to host pilgrims of the Way of Saint James on th…
In days gone by wedding cakes were very symbolic. Nowadays they are mostly decorative and there to tantalise the taste buds of the guests and bridal party. However, in some cultures the symbolism of the wedding cakes is still as strong as ever. In China brides have a huge layered cake whic
The merriment and mayhem of the festive season historically came to a head on Twelfth Night. Historical food blogger Sam Bilton looks back at centuries of celebration, and has a go at recreating a traditional Twelfth Night cake at home.
The royals tied the knot in 1947
Purchased & scanned by us. An old English book of sweet treats.
When it comes to all things sweet, French desserts are some of the best in the world. They are celebrated for their creativity, taste, finesse, as well as their celebration of local ingredients. Fr…
1949 cake
A selection of beautiful art history inspired birthday cakes to satisfy not only the appetite but also the eyes of art lovers.
This week we’re wondering: How did the wedding cake tradition begin?
Lady Behind The Curtain website shares a Appalachian favorite " Old Fashioned Stack Cake" recipe. Here is a quote from the article, "Here is a little history behind the “Stack Cake”. Because cakes were so expensive back in the days of old. Whenever there was a gathering like a barn…
An eighteenth century rococo dessert I created at the Bowes Museum in 1994 using a Chelsea botanical dessert service, Derby fruit baskets and figures. The sugar paste palace is surrounded by parterres filled with coloured sugar sands (sables d'office). All the confectionery items are made from eighteenth century recipes. The panelling in the room was taken from Chesterfield House, which had the earliest rococo interior in England. I have always been fascinated by the aesthetics of food and how it relates to prevailing trends in the mainstream visual arts of a given period. Dine in a good contemporary restaurant these days and your various menu choices will almost certainly be arranged rakishly on the plate with a garniture of gestural smears, dustings and drizzles. The prevailing aesthetic seems to be a culinary form of abstract impressionism. I had a nice lunch a couple of days ago in a promising new local brasserie. My starter was not quite an Arshile Gorky, my main course definitely a Willem de Kooning and my dessert a Mark Rothko, though painted crimson in coulis, sorbet and wild strawberry tuile rather than acrylics. But it must be said that what might seem like a cutting edge arrangement of food sitting on a dinner plate today will in a few years almost certainly look dated. 'Did we really eat like that?' you will probably ask, 'And did we really call it molecular gastronomy? How embarrassing!' Food is as subject to the vagaries of fashion as clothes, popular music and most other cultural manifestations. In the past, the prevailing styles of decorative art not only dictated the form and ornamentation, lets say, of a silver or porcelain dinner service, but frequently also the appearance of the food that was served on it. Some high status dishes in the medieval and early modern periods were not merely decorative, but adorned with images of allegorical, heraldic or religious significance. Witness the sixteenth century Portuguese almond paste mould below, carved with an image of Orpheus playing music to the beasts and birds - or the early modern French multi-purpose food mould with hunting scenes and coats of arms. Photo: courtesy of Errol Manners In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, pies with incredible baroque pastry decorations similar to those on plasterwork and woodcarving were a common element at important feasts. The pastry cooks who made these extraordinary food items possessed skills which were frequently as well developed as those of artists who worked in more conventional media. An eighteenth century dessert like the one illustrated at the beginning of this post might be surrounded with ice creams, flummeries and blancmanges moulded in the form of obelisks, tromp l'oeil baskets of fruit and other spectacular delights. The smears and drizzles of twenty-first century restaurant food, though attractive to us, would have seemed puzzling to an eighteenth century diner who expected a dessert dish to look more like this - Flummery made from a Wedgewood creamware mould c.1790 When the manufacture of food moulds started on an industrial scale in the nineteenth century, it was not just the wealthy who enjoyed artistically wrought food. Moulded dishes both savoury and sweet became fashionable at most levels of society. In the early Victorian period some diners even celebrated the accession of their young monarch with a jelly moulded in the form of her profile, rather like that on the celebrated penny black stamp issued in 1840. Nineteenth century English food was certainly intricate and highly decorated, as appearance was just as important as taste. The extraordinary Victorian Belgrave jelly with its internal spirals of cream Watch the above video of the remarkable Belgrave Jelly in motion A basket of flowers - this time made in fruit-flavoured water ices rather than flummery By the 1880s this highly ornamental style of cuisine was being practiced by home cooks as well as professionals. Cookery schools like that of Mrs Agnes B. Marshall in Mortimer Street, London were not only teaching housewives and domestic cooks how to make these spectacular dishes, but also sold you the necessary moulds, cutters and other equipment. So if you wanted to make the bundle of asparagus made of water ice like that above, you could not only buy the necessary moulds from Mrs Marshall's shop, but also learn the very tricky art of using them in one of her cookery lessons. By the way, all the food depicted in this post was made by me or by my students in my cookery classes. I can teach you how to make technically challenging dishes like this using original period equipment. So have a look at the courses page on my website. Mrs Marshall with her cookery class. Her apron and cuffs were as fancy as her culinary creations I have said that food presentation has always been subject to the influence of fashion, but it can also reflect more important issues, such as those of sensibility. For instance, the four ways of dishing up larks below, from Mrs Marshall’s The Cookery Book (London: 1885) may have looked appetizing and even charming to a Victorian diner, but a restaurant serving these little guys today would probably get a brick thrown through its windows. These steel engravings do illustrate just how food ornamentation has dramatically changed. The manner in which the food was actually served at table also had a profound effect on the style of presentation. Nowadays, restaurant food is delivered to each diner in the form of an individual plated-up serving, nicely manicured and tweaked by the chef. Mrs Marshall’s food was not designed for restaurants, but for serving in homes. Her dishes were cut up and served out at the table, so the aim was to have larger, often striking arrangements from which portions would be cut and shared out. Some of these dishes, especially the entrées and entremets, would look spectacular when first delivered to the table, but once attacked with a knife, the result would often be a mess. The salmon dish below, which I made from a recipe in Jules Gouffe, The Royal Cookery Book (London: 1868) with its ermine-like contised fillets of sole, truffled quenelles of whiting, whole truffles and crayfish looks far too amazing to eat! Such a pity to cut it all up and destroy the effect. Salmon à la Chambord 1868 Mrs Marshall died in 1905. Her fussy, highly ornamental food represented a style of dining that went back to the Second Empire and eventually to Carême. It was enjoying its final sunset in those years leading up to the Great War and she was one of its last advocates. A couple of years after her death Picasso painted Les Demoisseles d'Avignon and the world shifted dramatically on its aesthetic axis. Modernity kicked in and the presentation of food was inevitably influenced by the new zeitgeist. Minimalism in food presentation eventually triumphed over the highly embellished and figuratively moulded creations of the nineteenth century with their fussy garnitures. Skilled kitchen workers and servants who could work in this demanding labour-intensive genre also became scarce as a result of the Great War. In addition a stoicism in food matters set in through the influence of military culture and the privations of war. Fussy Victorian food started to look old fashioned and wasteful. Time-consuming dishes which required specialist moulds and a kitchen full of skilled servants lost their appeal. One highly decorative and technically demanding dish, which to me represents this lost culinary world, is the chartreuse. Antonin Carême offered recipes and illustrations of these spectacular creations in some of his books, and most other nineteenth century cookery writers follow suit. Originally they were savoury dishes in which vegetables cut into geometric shapes were used to line charlotte moulds. But there were sweet versions too. Here is one which I made a couple of days ago from Mrs Marshall's Cookery Book (London: 1885) called a Chartreuse of Peaches à la Royale. Chartreuse à la Royale, a fancy late Victorian entremet invented by the food writer Agnes B. Marshall Marshall was a clever and very entrepreneurial bunny. You will notice that in her recipe the bavaroise filling for the chartreuse is the same as that used in another of her dishes called Almond Charlotte à la Beatrice. Well this recipe is not in the same book. To get it you would have to buy her Larger Book of Recipes! She tells us to divide the bavaroise into three portions and colour them separately with her patent food colours of course- Marshall's carmine and vegetable green, which you had to buy from her shop. Cutters like these were essential for making chartreuse The finished chartreuse with its garniture and hatalet A plain charlotte mould was the other requirement When sliced, the bavaroise is revealed in three pastel shades Apart from lunatics like me, very few cooks make chartreuses nowadays. You need the patience of Job, a fine sense of detail and an expensive collection of antique culinary equipment. If you do want to have a bash, here is a recipe from 1932 (Anon. The Illustrated Cookery Book) for an easy one and probably the last surviving member of its race - a banana chartreuse. Just go easy on the gelatine to get the softest set and mouthfeel and you will have made a spectacular and delicious dish. Banana chartreuse 1932 - no chefy drizzles or smears here! Banana Chartreuse 1 pint of cream; 2 oz. of sugar ; ½ oz. of gelatine ; 1 gill of clear jelly; ½ pint of banana purée; 1 gill of water; 1 oz. of pistachio nuts; 2 bananas. A plain Charlotte mould should be lined with jelly, the 2 bananas cut into thin rounds, and the bottom of the mould lined with these rounds. Chop and blanch the pistachio nuts finely and sprinkle the spaces between the rounds with the nuts. Pour a little jelly over the decorations very carefully with a spoon and let this set, then decorate the sides of the moulds with the banana rounds and pistachio nuts in any pattern desired. Set the decorations with a little clear jelly. Rub sufficient bananas through a hair sieve to make half a pint of puree. Dissolve the gelatine and the sugar in the water, and strain them into the purée. Whip the cream and add lightly. When cold, fill the prepared mould with the mixture. Leave it in a cold place or on ice until set. Turn out the mould on to a glass or china dish and garnish with a little chopped jelly. A gill is 5 fluid ounces As well as sweet chartreuses, there were also many savoury ones like these below. This is a vegetable chartreuse made with discs of carrot and cucumber embedded in a partridge forcemeat Sometimes a chartreuse was made in a ring mould. The hollow in this one is filled with a fresh pea purée around which the grilled lamb cutlets have been arranged to form what was known as a 'turban' A steel engraving from Urbain Dubois, Cosmopolitan Cookery. (London: 1870. Showing how a vegetable chartreuse was used to create a turban, in this case Fillets of Pigeons à la chartreuse. Listen to BBC Radio 4 programme on food and art - Architects of Taste - available until 22 March 2012. Presented by Ian Kelly with contributions by Roy Strong, Anne Willan, Ferran Adria, Jane Asher, Ruth Cowan and Ivan Day. Some of Ivan's contributions to this programme were chosen by Simon Parkes for BBC Radio 4's prestigious Pick of the Week programme.
Steeped in history and tradition, get a peek of Smith Island Baking Company, the Maryland bakery making the cakes!
1. The Coffee Machine Museum The Coffee Machine Museum found via Present and correct) 2. This French Bath House for Sale Located in Amiens, asking 340K euros, found on Espaces Atypiques. 3. A Forgotten Chinese Bathhouse of Paris Built in 1787 at 29 boulevard des Italiens, they were popular before the French Revolution before they were destroyed in…
