5 - Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange

Summary

Abstract

To consider cake as a field of study or even as a case study seems a bit of a sweet indulgence, given that cake is hardly fundamental to the quotidian needs of good nutrition or a good meal. Rather, as Sir Toby indicates to the puritanical Malvolio, cake is (like ale), something that is part of revelry and celebration—a luxury. Yet, if we consider its history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (and beyond), cake provides a narrative of Europe's engagement with global exploration, colonization, and trade; the development of chemistry and technology; and the illusive networks and communities of recipe exchange. Thus, to study cake is to study culture, with its political, economic, technological, and artistic complexities.

Keywords: history of cake, historic recipes, colonialism and food, sugar and slavery

In Twelfth Night (1601), Sir Toby Belch proclaims to Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (2.3.103–4). To the puritanical Malvolio, ‘cake’ is (like ‘ale’) something that is part of revelry and celebration, that represents pleasure and therefore should be shunned. Malvolio's parsimony reflects the puritan elements of society interested in curbing the pleasure of cake. In the decade prior to Shakespeare's play, the Lord Clerk of the Markets issued a decree vastly constraining the sale of cakes:

That no Bakers, or other Person or Persons, shall at any time, or times hereafter, make, utter or sell by Retail, within or without their Houses, unto any the Queen's Subjects, any Spice Cakes, Buns, Bisket, or other Spice Bread, (being Bread out of Size, and not by Law allowed) except it be at Burials, or upon the Friday before Easter, or at Christmas.

The outlawing of cake, with the exception of funerals, Good Friday, and Christmas, represented a culturally imposed frugality associated with sectarian eagerness to control human gustatory desire. However, this decree was also part of a whole series of official assizes that controlled the price, quality, and quantity of food sold in the markets, in an effort to balance demand with supply.