Nicola Humble - Cake: A Global History

The first cake I remember was a train. It had chocolate biscuit wheels, a Cadburys mini-roll funnel, and windows made of sweets and glac cherries. It ran on a track of chocolate fingers and angelica. My mum made it, probably from instructions in a magazine Womens Weekly or Family Circle. It was my birthday cake the year I was five. I have no memory of what it tasted like, or even of eating it. Birthday cake wasnt really for eating, it was for looking at. I expect my friends were given squares wrapped in paper napkins and that they got squashed in their party bags on the way home. I remember it because it was my cake, made for me. It was a symbol of celebration, of the specialness of being the birthday girl. It was food that was played with, turned into a toy. It was treat piled on treat, so sweet and sickly that no child could manage more than a few bites.

Now a mother myself, I swear each year that I will not go overboard on my sons birthday cake, and each year the construction is more complicated, more ambitious, more absurd. A chest full of treasure for a pirate picnic party (the lid slid off when I tried to move it); a planet complete with marzipan aliens for a space party; a piata cake with a chocolate bowl over it which the birthday boy cracked with a hammer; a pyramid cake with a secret tomb inside it. I am well aware that Ireach the limits of sanity with these constructions toiling obsessively late into the night. At the parties the guests glance at them briefly and then ignore them. This is cake at the edge of rationality: excessive, outlandish, its form utterly overwhelming its function, its status as food only notional. These cakes are maternal anxiety and culinary ego made solid. My feelings about them are as much shame as pride.

Cakes are very strange things, producing a range of emotional responses far out of keeping with their culinary significance. They are simultaneously utterly unnecessary and absolutely crucial. You cant properly have a birthday or a wedding without a cake. Christmas cake is central to our celebration, yet its inedible hardness is legendary the family jokes about saws and the cake that will never die part of the point. Cake is one of those foodstuffs whose symbolic function can completely overwhelm its actual status as comestible. More than anything, cake is an idea. But cakes are also incontrovertibly material: lusciously spongy or solid with fruit, sticky, creamy, loaded with sweetness, filled and iced and decorated: food layered on food. They are unmistakeable; ineffably present in their sweet excess.

Yet despite their assertive, insistent materiality, cakes are also curiously fugitive. Start to trace the history of cake and you are soon lost in a thicket of competing definitions. Because there is a central problem: how do we know a cake when we see one? Is a cake a cake because it is round, or because it is flat? Is it because it is soft, or because it is compressed? Is it a cake if it is made light and spongy with eggs or baking agents? Can it still be a cake if the raising agent is yeast? Or does cake-ness instead depend on the structural role the food plays? If it is the sweet centrepiece of a celebration, is it a cake? If it is served with tea in the afternoon, or coffee in the morning, does it qualify? In certain cultures,at certain historical moments, each of these elements has been the crucial one in defining a cake.

Then there are the many border disputes between cake and its near neighbours: how and why does cake differ from bread? When does the boundary between these closely related foods become fixed? And how do we draw the line between cake and a whole host of cousins: tea-bread, biscuits, cookies, muffins, scones, pastries and puddings? Are pancakes cakes? What about cheesecakes? Such questions might seem solely the territory of the food-nerd, yet they have been behind some high-profile court battles in recent years. Most notable is the case of Jaffa Cakes, whose manufacturer, McVities, launched a case against the UK Inland Revenue in 1991, arguing that their chocolate-coated orange-centred confections were cakes and not biscuits, and therefore should not be liable for VAT. The company won their case, basing their claim on the culinary principle that the crucial difference between biscuits and cakes is that cakes dry as they stale and biscuits soften. Fair enough; yet three years later, Marks & Spencer mounted a similar case over their chocolate teacakes (a mound of marshmallow on a chocolate biscuit, covered in milk chocolate) which they took all the way to the European Court of Justice. The eventual decision, reached in April 2008 after twelve years of legal wrangling, that the British government should refund 3.5 million of overpaid tax to the company, seems to have been based not on a culinary principle of the difference between cakes and biscuits, but on a peculiarly intuitive sense (which the British government conceded at the very start of the case) that M&Ss teacakes, with their roundness, their squishy filling, their richness, their