wafers are thin, crisp sheets made by cooking batter between flat metal plates. The traditional wafer iron resembles a pair of scissors with plates where the blades would be.
In a sense, wafers are descended from the Jewish matzah, since they originated as the bread (the Communion wafer) used in the Catholic mass, which has always been unleavened because the Last Supper took place during Passover. See passover. This bread (called oblata, “that which is offered,” by the sixth century) was regularly marked with a religious design before baking. The first wafer irons appeared in the ninth century, probably so that a religious establishment could make an unlimited number of wafers with a standard design over an ordinary fire without having to heat up an oven.
By the twelfth century laypeople had developed a taste for oblatas and were eating them for pleasure. Secular wafers were cooked in irons with nonreligious patterns, the most common being hexagons resembling the cells of a honeycomb. As a result, they were often called by names derived from wafel, a Germanic word for honeycomb. (In French, this was pronounced walfre and eventually became gaufre or gaufrette.)
However, the religious name oblata (French oublie, English obley) long continued to be used for secular wafers. The late-thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman “Treatise of Walter of Bibbesworth” includes an enthusiastic description of a banquet ending with sweet spices e oubleie a fuisoun (and plenty of wafers), and the word survives in Spanish and Czech.
In the Middle Ages, wafers still usually kept company with wine, specifically the spiced wine hippocras. See hippocras. In the manuscript known as Le ménagier de Paris (ca. 1390), 6 out of 20 model menus ended with hippocras and wafers known as mestiers. By this time, wafers were often enriched with eggs, wine, and other ingredients; Le ménagier describes wafers made with cheese. Although the manuscript gives recipes for gaufres, it also recommends buying them from pastry makers.
Occasionally, though, wafers were used in cooking, in ways we might not expect. The Forme of Cury (also ca. 1390) gives an English recipe for stewed hare, which instructs, “Take obleys oþer wafrouns in defaute of loseyns and cowche in dishes” (take oblatas or wafers in place of broad noodles and lay in dishes).
In more recent times, although plain wafers still sometimes appear with wine, they are nearly always sweetened and typically accompany coffee or ice cream. The crisp texture and versatile shape of the wafer have inspired many uses, which we would today consider sweet biscuits or cookies. In the early seventeenth century they were rolled up into cylinders while still warm, as depicted in Lubin Baugin’s painting Le Dessert de gaufrettes (1630–1635). Such wafers may be filled, frequently with chocolate, as in the Dutch New Year’s treat knieppertjies, and in commercially made Piroulines, which originated in Belgium in 1860. Wafers could also be formed into cones, which were occasionally used for serving ice cream in the nineteenth century. The craze for ice cream cones in the United States, the most ice-cream-crazed country, dates from the 1904 Columbian Exposition. See ice cream cones.
The obvious way to elaborate wafers is to stack them. The spa wafers (oplatky) that originated in the health resorts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the nineteenth century consist of two thin wafers sandwiched together, usually with a filling of chocolate and hazelnut. In Mexico and Central America, an oblea is two wafers sandwiched with dulce de leche. A particularly remarkable wafer is the Dutch stroopwafel, which consists of a slightly leavened wafer split in half while hot and filled with a thick caramel syrup (stroop being Dutch for “syrup”). Unfortunately, it loses its delightful crispness after a few days.
Wafers lend themselves to being rolled up while still warm, as we see in Lubin Baugin’s painting Le Dessert de gaufrettes (Still Life with Wafers, 1630–1635). The goblet of wine suggests the original use of wafers as Communion bread, though by the twelfth century they were being enjoyed in secular settings as well. the yorck project, distributed by directmedia publishing gmbh
But why stop with two wafers? Thicker products, such as the Neapolitan wafer (actually of Austrian origin), can be made with three to five layers and perhaps covered with chocolate or another coating, as with the Kit Kat bar.
The word “wafer” has come to refer to any thinnish sheet—hence the name of the American vanilla cookie Nilla Wafers, which are baked rather than cooked between irons. The ultimate development of the wafer is cooked in an iron that creates a deep pattern of square indentations. There are several local varieties in Belgium, where caramelized waffles are a yeast-raised snack or street food. In the United States, the Belgian waffle is a breakfast treat—a fancy-dress pancake, as it were—raised with baking powder.
See also biscuits, british; candy bar; cooking irons; dulce de leche; netherlands; rolled cookies; and zalabiya.
wagashi, which means “Japanese confectionery,” signifies a broad category of sweets that includes mochi and dumplings (dango) made in Japan from the prehistoric era; Chinese imports such as stuffed buns (manjū) and yōkan, initially introduced as vegetarian foods in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) but transformed into confectionery in the early modern period (1600–1868); and “southern barbarian sweets,” sixteenth-century adaptations of Portuguese recipes. See azuki beans; dango; manjū; mochi; and nanbangashi. The term wagashi was coined at the end of the 1800s to contrast Japanese confectionery with “Western sweets” (yōgashi)—cakes and other baked goods that had entered the Japanese diet through later European and American introductions. See japanese baked goods. However, wagashi did not become the standard term for Japanese confectionery until after World War II.
Wagashi combines the referent for Japan (wa) with kashi (which becomes gashi in compound words). Kashi refers to any type of sweet today, but the word’s literal meaning is “fruit and nuts,” which were Japan’s earliest snacks; these included dried persimmons, chestnuts, and Japanese nutmeg (kaya). These snacks were eaten between meals in the ancient period and served as “sweets” for the tea ceremony in the 1500s. Sugar, known in Japan since the 700s, was considered a rare medicine; in its place, the Japanese made limited use of honey, rice glucose (mizu ame), and a decoction from the sweet arrowroot vine (amazura). Besides popularizing sugar in Japan, the Portuguese disseminated knowledge of its use in confectionery, allowing for sweetened versions of previously savory snacks like manjū and mochi. In the 1600s tea practitioners began using sugar-sweetened confectionery purchased from confectioners, who were the major buyers of imported sugar. Apart from their reliance on refined sugar, wagashi are distinguished by the use of highly milled rice flour, and by an, a paste made from sweetened azuki beans. In addition to aficionados of the tea ceremony, the consumers of wagashi in the early modern period were wealthy merchants, court aristocrats, and the warrior elite. Commoners enjoyed “inexpensive sweets” (dagashi), penny candies and other treats made from domestic brown sugar and less highly refined flours.
Among the many varieties of wagashi are “moist sweets” (namagashi) and “dry sweets” (higashi). Moist sweets derive their soft texture from an. Sometimes the an is combined with sugar and rice flour to make a dough called konashi that is shaped into sweets. In other instances, the an is a topping or filling, or it can serve as the primary ingredient, as in yōkan. Dry sweets such as rakugan have little water content and are made from rice flour and refined sugar molded into various shapes. Senbei, savory crackers made from rice flour, are sometimes included in the category of higashi. The sweet called monaka was invented in the early 1800s as a senbei stuffed with an; the crisp shell offsets the soft filling in a marriage of moist and dry sweets.
Wagashi use similar ingredients, but by changing their colors and shapes, confectioners in the early modern period developed hundreds of varieties, as evidenced by culinary texts and sample books of the period. See japan. Handmade wagashi are works of art, rivaling in their craftsmanship and beauty the jewelry of Fabergé or Tiffany. Connoisseurs appreciate the taste, odor, texture, appearance, and even sound of the wagashi when they are eaten. The artistic names (mei) given to the many varieties of traditional sweets add to their appeal. These names can suggest a particular region or reference famous people, local scenery, flowers, and animals; they can also evoke phrases from ancient poems. Because most varieties of wagashi are available only during certain times of the year, their names are associated with holidays and the seasons, as by suggesting the flowers that will soon be in bloom. February is the time for plum blossom motifs, March for peach, and April for cherry blossoms. October sweets reference chrysanthemums, persimmons, chestnuts, rice plants, or geese. Appreciating the artful name of the sweet is an important part of enjoying wagashi, especially in the tea ceremony.
Traditional sweets are available at confectioners, many of which also market to customers in the gigantic food emporiums in department-store basements. Since confectionery is often given as gifts, wagashi are beautifully packaged and available at tourist destinations, airports, and train stations. The confectioner Toraya operates a wagashi museum in Tokyo; in Kyoto there is another museum, opened by the confectioner Tawaraya Yoshitomi. June 16 is Wagashi Day in Japan, a holiday that originated with the early-modern warrior government and imperial court, which distributed sweets to retainers as a way of promoting health.
See also portugal’s influence in asia.
wasanbon is the most famous sugar used in traditional Japanese confectionery. See sugar. Faintly yellow in color, it has fine crystals and a subtle bouquet. The derivation of the word is uncertain. The referent wa indicates domestic Japanese manufacture; sanbon could be the Japanese version of the name of the Chinese person who disseminated the sugar-making process to Japan, or it could refer to “three bowls” (sanbon) used in the production process.
While sugar was known as an expensive medicine in the 700s, Japanese cooking did not make much use of sweeteners until the Portuguese and Chinese reintroduced sugar in the late 1500s, and Japanese consumers quickly developed a taste for the product. See japan. In an effort to improve Japan’s balance of trade, Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751) sought to stem purchases of imported sugar by encouraging the domestic production of sugarcane. Although Yoshimune directed that sugar be planted throughout Japan, today sugarcane for wasanbon is grown only in Kagawa and Tokushima prefectures in Shikoku, where the artisanal techniques used to make wasanbon developed in the late 1700s. Farmers plant a thin variety of Chinese sugarcane called Saccharum sinense. The cane is harvested in December and crushed to extract the juice, which is then boiled to evaporate the water. The cooled liquid is pressed in a cloth bag and kneaded by hand in four changes of water to remove the molasses before the sugar is dried. Wasanbon is mainly used to make dry confectionery (higashi), for which it is mixed with refined rice flour and formed into molded shapes. See wagashi.
Weber, Johannes Martin Erich (1885–1961), was arguably the premier publisher of confectionery trade manuals in their golden age between the two world wars. He established his baking school and publishing and supply houses in Dresden, Germany, in 1911, moving them in the early 1920s to Dresden’s suburb, Radebeul, where they remained until being closed by the Communist government in 1948.
While the creations Weber presented in his books, and the books themselves, were as lavish as those of his competitors, what really set his volumes apart was their breadth of readership. From 1913 to 1929, Weber marketed his works to an international audience by publishing the texts in multiple languages rather than in separate supplements. For example, his first publication, Practical Confectionery Art (Praktische Konditorei-Kunst), appeared in at least eight editions, including one in German, Danish, Czech, and Dutch; another in German, Swedish, Spanish, and English; and an all-English version intended exclusively for American readers. To make his typically long German titles easier to remember, he abbreviated some of them into snappy nicknames, such as Pra-Ko-Ku for Praktische Konditorei-Kunst.
He also often included teaching aids with his more expensive volumes: cardboard or celluloid stencils, perforated paper patterns, separate how-to-pipe plates, recipe booklets, and even an enormous foldout pattern sheet for sugar temples. Always the savvy promoter, Weber would either print his supply catalog on a book’s final pages or glue one inside the back cover.
After Hitler’s rise to power, Weber published only in German, employing Gothic type and geometric designs that could be interpreted as either modernist or fascist. Most of his work during the 1930s emphasized practical information, but his final publication, in 1939, Webers bildlicher Fachunterricht zu Hochstleistungen in moderner Konditorei (Weber’s Illustrated Textbook in Advanced Modern Confectionery) contained 600 pages and 1,000 illustrations.
After World War II, Weber was interned by the Soviets for several years. On his release he returned to Radebeul and lived there until his death.
See also black forest cake; confectionery manuals; and germany.
wedding celebrations have historically provided an opportunity for lavish displays of wealth, and ever since the late medieval period, sugar confectionery has been an important feature of European weddings. Like so many other cultural phenomena, sugar’s close relations to nuptial celebrations appears to have originated in Italy at the humanist courts. Important patrician wedding feasts in the early Renaissance were more like complicated theatrical performances than dinners. Costly confections, sweetmeats, and sugar sculpture often played their role in expressing power and status at more straightforward civic banquets, but when two powerful dynastic houses were joined in marriage, no expense was spared. See sugar sculpture.
In A Renaissance Wedding, Jane Bridgeman describes a truly remarkable wedding feast held in Pesaro in 1475 celebrating the marriage of Costanzo Szorza and Camilla Marzano d’Aragona. Compared to most modern wedding receptions, this was a truly lavish affair. It included many sweet elements that have survived into modern times, so it is worth giving a fairly full account of the occasion here.
A banquet consisting of twelve courses was served in the great hall of the ducal palace in Pesaro, its ceiling decorated with stars and astrological blessings. The first six courses were presided over by the sun, and the second six by the moon. Each course was presented to the table by a god or goddess. This epic meal lasted over seven hours, and sugar confections and fantasies were featured throughout. At one point youths performing a ballet offered the guests items of sugar jewelry from elaborate sugar caskets. During another interval, 80 young men danced before the table with baskets of confectionery and sugar sculptures of castles, birds, and animals. Beautifully decorated majolica bowls, tazze, and goblets were offered to the bride and groom, but these also turned out to be made of sugar. After this brief amusement, an “Ethiopian,” mounted on a large model of a camel, scattered comfits into the hall from two heavily laden basket panniers. This was followed by the entrance of a large triumphal carriage drawn by two white oxen representing The Triumph of Chastity, entirely made from sugar and offered as a gift by one of the leading apothecaries of Pesaro. At the end of the feast the couple were presented with a sugar sculpture of Mount Parnassus, while 20 actors dressed as Greek and Latin poets read from books made out of sugar painted to look like real illuminated manuscripts.
In addition to all the allegorical sugar floats and figures that appeared during the intervals of the meal, the first, sixth, seventh, and twelfth courses consisted entirely of sweets. Among the nine dishes of the first course were lilies modeled out of pine-nut marzipan, sugar garlic cloves (a joke), gilded bread for the high table, and silvered bread for everyone else. The sixth course featured junkets ornamented with the Svorza armorials, and clary wafers in the form of clouds. See junket. The final servizio consisted of spiced wine, comfits of every kind, twisted wafers, and quince paste. See comfit and wafers.
This type of Italian humanist model set the style for high-status weddings throughout Europe. Although fish, flesh, and fowl were important elements at these feasts, sugar and confectionery were served in just as much abundance and in extraordinary variety. In the early days, sugar was a very costly item in Europe, so offering it in considerable abundance to the guests was an impressive expression of largesse and conviviality.
The custom of comfit throwing, which was carried out from the back of a fake camel at the Pesaro wedding, featured at most other weddings in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. It was derived from the ancient Judaic ritual of scattering the bride and groom with grains of wheat to presage worldly wealth and sexual fecundity. This age-old tradition, one of the most durable of wedding customs, is still with us today. The throwing of rice, sugared seeds, and paper confetti have all evolved from this practice. European colonists took the tradition all over the world. A 1748 text by Louis de Gaya describes a Portuguese wedding in Goa: “When they are married they are brought home in some Order, with the sound of Trumpets, Cornets, and other musical Instruments, every one as they pass by throwing Flowers, sweet Waters and Confits upon them, which are gathered up by the servants.” Confetti, the Italian name for a sugar-encrusted seed, spice, or nut, was transferred to the now-familiar tiny paper cutouts in France at the end of the nineteenth century. These were sold as a safe alternative to sugared almonds, which had caused eye injuries when thrown by overly enthusiastic revelers. See confetti.
The counterfeit sugar jewelry (there were also gilded coins printed with the happy couple’s portraits) offered to guests at the Sforza wedding are early instances of wedding favors, edible gifts designed to take home as mementos. The oldest and most durable example of these were sugared almonds, which were always on offer in abundance during the final course of Renaissance wedding banquets for the guests to fill their purses and pockets. From Europe to the United States, these are still popular today. Favors molded into figurative devices were also important, such as the musk comfits printed with armorials in the last course of the Sforza wedding. An anonymous English cookery book called The Whole Duty of a Woman (London, 1704) explains how they were made: “Your small Toys made of Sugar, in the Shape of Birds, Beasts, Flowers &c are made of melted Sugar in Rose-water cast in Moulds, and Gilded or Painted afterwards at Discretion.” In the late nineteenth century, when chocolate tempering had become fully understood, molded chocolate novelties suddenly became very popular. The mold manufacturers’ catalogues of the period are full of chocolate bridal bouquets, horseshoes, doves, and all the other sentimental emblems of marital bliss. See publications, trade.
Pretzel-like cookies known as gemelli, gimblette, or jumbals, tied up in the form of true lovers’ knots, appear to have been an important element in early modern weddings, particularly in the Low Countries. Early seventeenth-century Antwerp school artists such as Clara Peeters and Osias Beert frequently depicted these intricately knotted symbols of fidelity in paintings of wedding banquets. Quince paste, considered an aphrodisiac, and iced marchpanes scattered with comfits and embellished with sprigs of gilded rosemary also feature in these works.
See also cake decorating; fruit pastes; hard candy; hippocras; marzipan; and wedding cake.
wedding cake may have its origins in the ancient Roman practice of breaking a cake of wheat or barley (mustaceum) over the bride’s head as a symbol of good fortune, but many centuries would pass before a special cake became a focal point at weddings. As was the custom with other important celebrations, the hosts served the finest food they could afford; for the wealthy and nobility this included dishes containing dried fruits, spices, and sugar, luxuries imported from exotic lands. Enormously expensive, they became fashionable status symbols for the affluent elite. See dried fruits and spices.
Medieval European bakers made lavishly spiced fruit cakes for special occasions, adding dried fruits, spices, and sugar to bread dough, although the cakes were not covered with icing. See fruitcake.
British Wedding Cakes
Rich, spicy fruitcakes were served at splendid medieval feasts, and for centuries afterward at important occasions and celebrations such as Easter, Christmas, weddings, and christenings.
The first published recipe for a cake made specifically for a wedding appeared in 1655, in The Queen’s Closet Open’d. This was “the Countess of Rutland’s receipt for making the rare Banbury cake.” It was actually enriched bread dough containing yeast, eggs, butter, dried fruits, spices, rosewater, ambergris, and musk; the dough was encased in pastry before baking. See ambergris; breads, sweet; and flower waters. The enormous cake, which weighed more than 30 pounds, was carried by an usher and shown off to the wedding guests for them to admire.
A cake made expressly for a wedding became known as “Bride Cake.” The less prosperous would have had much smaller and less costly bride cakes. One example consisted of two large rounds of shortcrust pastry sandwiched together with currants and sprinkled with sugar on top. See pie dough. Very few homes at the time had an oven, but this type of pastry cake could easily be cooked on a bakestone on the hearth or on an iron griddle.
Another British recipe expressly noted for a wedding is Bride Pye, recorded by Robert May in the 1685 edition of The Accomplisht Cook. Bride Pye, served at the wedding feast of Oliver Cromwell’s daughter in 1657, was an extraordinary feature of seventeenth-century wedding banquets. The large round pie had an ornately embellished pastry crust that concealed a filling of oysters, pine kernels, cockscombs, lambstones (testicles), sweetbreads, and spices. The less affluent had cheaper versions containing minced meat, suet, and sometimes dried fruits and spices. Bride pie was still being served at weddings in some parts of England as late as the nineteenth century. See mince pies and pie.
Bride cake covered with white icing first appeared in the seventeenth century. It was frosted with the forerunner of royal icing; a meringue mixture of whisked egg whites and sugar was applied to the hot cake straight from the oven and then returned to the oven to set. Constant vigilance was required to ensure that it didn’t color. See icing and meringue.
Sugar had been imported to England since the Middle Ages, but by the 1540s it was more readily available and affordable in cones of varying quality. “Double refined” sugar was twice-refined white sugar; powdered icing or confectioner’s sugar was unknown. References to “powdered sugar” refer to granulated sugar that had been pounded fine and sifted. See sugar. A pure white icing was much sought after, as it meant that only the finest refined sugar (the most expensive) had been used. Thus, a pure white cake was a status symbol, a display of the family’s wealth. The Victorians put forward the concept that the white icing symbolized purity.
The earliest printed recipe for a Bride Cake with icing appeared in Elizabeth Raffald’s book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769). It was the first to unite bride cake, almond paste, and icing. Raffald’s recipe used eggs as a raising agent, and the batter was cooked in a wooden hoop, not enclosed in pastry. After baking, the cake was spread with a layer of almond paste, then covered with white icing made with double-refined sugar, fine starch (possibly corn starch), and egg whites. Commercial icing sugar began to be produced in the mid-nineteenth century.
At Queen Victoria’s wedding to Prince Albert in 1840, white icing decorated the cake; this icing has been known as “royal icing” ever since. The elaborately decorated, multi-tier cake measured more than nine feet in circumference and was the first wedding cake to depict sugar sculptures of the bride and groom—a feature that was quickly copied by wedding-cake makers everywhere. Illustrations of the royal wedding cake appeared in publications throughout the world, and those who could afford it wanted a similar cake.
The multi-tiered British wedding cake—an impressive edifice of heavily fruited cake layers decorated with royal icing and embellished with sugar flowers, doves, horseshoes, and bells—had its origins in the wedding cake made for the marriage of Prince Leopold in 1882. Unlike Queen Victoria’s cake, where only the base consisted of cake and the upper tiers were entirely of sugar, Prince Leopold’s wedding cake had three tiers, and each tier was an iced cake. For the first time guests could enjoy a wedding cake made entirely of cake. The iced cakes were placed one on top of the other to form a stack, rather like hatboxes. The icing in between was hardened to prevent the upper tiers from sinking into the lower layers. It would be another twenty years before the tiers would be separated by columns (often disguised pieces of broom handle), and it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the tiers were separated and supported by columns of hardened icing. The British wedding cake influenced wedding cakes throughout the British Empire and beyond, with wealthy families vying to outshine one another by the height and weight of their wedding cake.
By the nineteenth century, Bride Cake had gradually acquired the name “wedding cake,” although Alexis Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery for the People (1854) carried an illustrated baker’s advertisement for “Bride and Wedding Cakes.”
British wedding cakes remained virtually unchanged from the elaborate Victorian creations until the 1980s, when the intricately piped royal icing began to be replaced by softer fondant icing, which could be rolled out, draped, frilled, and modeled into flowers, bells, and other ornaments. At the same time, simpler, American-style layer cakes, such as carrot cake with cream cheese filling or Key lime coconut cake, came into vogue. See cake decorating.
Other Wedding Cakes
The rest of Europe regarded the traditional tiered iced fruitcake as peculiarly English and preferred less heavy confections, with many regional specialties taking pride of place on the wedding table.
French weddings are traditionally celebrated with a croquembouche (literally “crunch in the mouth”), a conical construction of choux balls on a nougatine base filled with whipped cream, held together with caramel and decorated with rosettes of whipped cream, candied fruits, sugared almonds, and spun sugar. See caramel and croquembouche. Croquembouche is a descendant of the pièce montée, a large, ornamental item of patisserie that had its heyday in the nineteenth century when the great French chef Carême reigned supreme. See carême, marie-antoine and sugar sculpture.
Traditional Italian wedding cakes are simpler. Crostata di frutta (fresh fruit tart), millefoglie (mille feuilles), or pan di spagna (sponge cake) filled with cream and covered in icing or whipped cream are typical, although, as with all Italian cooking, there are many regional specialties; Sardinian weddings serve caschettas, small pastries shaped like white roses (“as thin as the veil of a bride”) and typically filled with honey, hazelnuts, cinnamon, and orange peel. See sponge cake.
Spanish wedding cakes resemble a flan and are typically filled with nuts and fruits and occasionally custard. Another type consists of several sponge cakes with a caramel topping and fresh cream, which may be filled, layered, tiered, or stacked in a hatbox fashion.
In Salamanca, bollo Maimón is a ring-shaped cake made with flour, sugar, eggs, and yeast; nowadays it is usually covered in chocolate.
Sourdough wedding bread decorated with beads and blossoms was traditional at Greek weddings. These days many Greek couples favor a flourless almond cake filled with vanilla custard and fruit and covered in sliced almonds.
In Germany the traditional Baumkuchen or “tree cake” is a tower of irregular cake rings with a coating of white or dark chocolate icing. It is not baked in a tin but built up with over fifteen layers of batter, which are spooned over a revolving hardwood roller in front of an open flame. When the cake is cut into wedges, it resembles the rings of a tree trunk. See baumkuchen. In northern Germany, Butterkuchen (butter cake) and Zuckerkuchen (sugar cake) are sweet yeast dough cakes; the topping is created by pressing holes into the dough, spreading butter over the top, then sprinkling with sugar and almonds. Modern German wedding cakes tend to be rich nut or sponge cakes laced with liqueur or syrup and filled with jam, marzipan, or nougat covered in fondant or ganache. See fondant; marzipan; and nougat.
The Scandinavian and Icelandic wedding cake kransekake comes in two forms. The traditional wedding cake is conical in shape, baked in ring tins of varying sizes and decorated with white icing. Sometimes the same dough is used to make a cornucopia (overflødighedshorn) so that the open end of the horn can be stuffed with chocolates and other sweets.
Enriched breads like babka, a rich, buttery, yeasted dough, are popular in eastern Europe. See breads, sweet. The sweet dough is decorated with symbols of family and fertility, such as birds and trees. The round Polish wedding bread has a hole cut into it which is filled with salt for good luck. In Slovenia the wedding bread is usually a beautifully decorated braided dough.
Many of today’s brides throughout the world opt for British- and American-style cakes with multiple layers, fondant icing, piped frosting, and decorations, although contemporary wedding cakes can be of any color, flavor, or shape. From a tower of colorful cupcakes or individual desserts to a plain sponge cake simply iced and decorated with fresh or sugar flowers, wedding cakes, like the bride’s dress, are subject to the vagaries of fashion, with celebrity weddings and cake designers continually striving to create new trends.
See also cake.
The West (U.S.), with its moderate climate and fertile land, particularly along the coast and inland valleys, features desserts that decidedly focus on the fruits and nuts that flourish in the region. A favorite dessert flavor is lemon—often the sweet Meyer, followed by other fruits and nuts, with apples possibly in the lead. Chocolate is also very popular. Recently cultivated with success in Hawaii, chocolate also has a long history of quality production in the West.
Even before the arrival of European explorers, the West was a land of plenty, and it was more densely populated by indigenous peoples than other regions of North America. Many native ingredients, favored for desserts today, are now grown commercially, such as blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, and hazelnuts (filberts). Foragers in the Northwest harvest, as the Native peoples did, salmonberries, cloudberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries (red and blue), and wild strawberries. See native american and pacific northwest (U.S.). The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 opened the Northwest to overland pioneers who brought their traditional American pies, cakes, cobblers, and puddings. Later, Scandinavian immigrants introduced their pastries and sweets.
The southern half of the West was Spanish territory from the sixteenth century. Spanish missionaries settled California in the eighteenth century and immediately planted grapes, fruit and nut trees, and much more. In 1821, Mexico took over, with its legendary ranchero hospitality. The flavors of Spain and Mexico linger in Western desserts—flans, polvorones (Mexican wedding cookies), cookies, and tres leches cake (incorporating cream and two kinds of canned milk). See tres leches cake and southwest (u.s.).
California gained independence in 1846 and was annexed as a state in 1850 during the frenzy of the Gold Rush. San Francisco, the port of entry for the flood of gold seekers, predominately male, from all over the world—Europe, Russia, Africa, the Far East, Mexico, and Latin America—became the epitome of a boomtown. The demand for the best by those who struck it rich set off a food and wine frenzy that has never really slowed in the city. French food and wines were the standard, and elegant French desserts became and remain a part of the West’s repertoire.
Many who sought gold found it, not in “them thar hills,” but in San Francisco and mining towns catering to tastes for high living. Ghirardelli and Guittard, two chocolate manufacturers who settled in San Francisco around this time, are still present. See ghirardelli and guittard. Contemporary producers include Sharffen Berger and TCHO in the San Francisco Bay area, and Theo Chocolate in Seattle.
In the early 1900s, San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel brought aboard Victor Hirtzler, a French chef who had literally cooked for kings. His book The 1910 Hotel St. Francis Cook Book (reissued in 1988) reinforced appreciation for all that was French—crêpes, savarin, pound cake, crème caramel, and bavarois. See desserts, chilled; flan (pudím); pancakes; and pound cake.
Santa Clara Valley, today dubbed Silicon Valley, was known in post–Gold Rush years as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight because, until the 1960s, it was the largest fruit-producing region in the world. Apricots, peaches, pears, plums, cherries, and more grew abundantly. These farms have shifted locations, largely to the Central Valley, where California continues to harvest more than half of all U.S. production of non-citrus fruits and nuts, and over 30 percent of the U.S. citrus crop. Washington State ranks third.
Sunset, a West-centric lifestyle magazine founded in 1898 and featuring articles on home, garden, food, and travel, has long celebrated the regional bounty and was instrumental in popularizing the use of locally grown persimmons, pomegranates, Asian pears, avocados, citrus varietals, macadamias, English walnuts, papaya, passion fruit, mangoes, kiwifruit, Meyer lemons, Rangpur limes, boysenberries, and marionberries—often with grow-it-yourself instructions.
In a July 1930 Sunset article titled “Eating Up and Down the Coast,” Genevieve Callahan and Lou Richardson reported on crêpes for dessert, zabaione (zabaglione) with sherry or port, mangoes, and coconut dainties. See zabaglione. The editors raved about baked oranges at Mission Inn in Riverside, California, and praised frango, a flaky frozen dessert at Frederick and Nelson’s tearoom in Seattle. But they complained that they couldn’t get fresh local peaches, pears, oranges, apricots, cherries, or apples, since the best produce was not sold in the areas where it was grown. That issue has since been resolved with the explosion of farmers’ markets, thanks to the California Direct Marketing Act of 1977, which made available locally wonderful produce varieties, many old, some new, that were considered too perishable or not productive enough for commercial use.
Helen Evans Brown wrote in her West Coast Cook Book (1956) that by the 1860s and 1870s, sugar was available, as trading vessels were stopping at Western ports, and early cookbooks had multiple recipes for cakes and pies, as well as chocolate soufflés, caramels, éclairs, meringues with fruit, ices, and blancmange. See blancmange; caramels; ice cream; meringue; and soufflé. Brown’s recipes included burnt almond cream, avocado mousse, crêpes, sour cream date pie, filbert torte, lemon butter, deep-dish apple pie, and Chinese almond cookies.
The Italian immigrant element is well represented in popular desserts like zabaglione, cannoli, tiramisù, zuppa inglese, panna cotta, biscotti, fried cream, and crostatas. See biscotti; tiramisù; and zuppa inglese.
Like the tides of the Pacific, favored desserts roll in and out. Flavors persist; ingredients persist and expand, as do old-fashioned names, but the presentations and combinations are ever changing—with “fresh” as the magic word that characterizes the desserts of the West.
wheat berries are the raw kernels of the cereal plant wheat. Native to Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, wheat was first domesticated in Neolithic times. Since then it has been a staple nourishment as well as a symbol of fertility, prosperity, birth, and rebirth for cultures throughout the world. As the cultivation of wheat spread, so did its cultural significance. Because wheat has long been associated with deities, it is not surprising that both the early Christian and Islamic traditions in Anatolia adopted it. See christianity and islam. In earlier cultures the Greek goddess Demeter is depicted with a wheat stalk in hand, as are many other fertility goddesses, including Hittite Kubaba and Roman Ceres, the mother of agriculture and of all grain crops.
In Anatolia, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, celebratory wheat dishes mark seasonal changes, rites of passage, religious holidays, and other important occasions. Sweets made with boiled whole-wheat berries are indispensable for certain occasions: the first month of the Islamic calendar is marked by aşure in Turkey; Christmas and New Year are welcomed by Armenians with anush abur; Sephardic Jews celebrate the flowering of fruit trees and the awakening of nature with kofyas or trigo koço at Tu b’Shevat; the appearance of the first baby tooth is shared with tooth wheat under a variety of names in Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria; and the same sweet (berbara, burbara) gives hope to unmarried girls on St. Barbara’s (or Varvara’s) Day on 4 December. All these dishes represent hope for the future.
Yet wheat berries also signify mourning: the dead are bid farewell with Greek koliva or kólliva. The dish appears throughout the Balkans under similar names. Although some suggest that the term koliva derives from helva, another funeral sweet in Turkey, it comes from the Greek kollybos—the smallest coin, whose name relates to a Semitic word meaning “to exchange.” Similar, too, is Georgia’s honey-sweetened gorgot or korkoti for funerals and commemorations. Commemorative wheat-berry sweets also include Chinese longevity grain porridge, ba bao zou or laba zhou, “eight-jewel rice pudding.” All these wheat-berry sweets are linked to the concept of sharing. They are always made in huge quantities and distributed to the community, neighbors, friends, and relatives, even to strangers and the poor.
Some of these sweets are of pudding consistency; others are dry, the boiled grains like little pellets. Turkish aşure and its Balkan and Armenian equivalents are soupy puddings. Abundant with dried fruits, raisins, sultanas, dried apricots, figs, and nuts, they are flavored with rosewater and cinnamon and decorated with more nuts and pomegranates to represent plenty. See flower waters. The funeral or commemoration wheat-berry sweets are generally dry. They are mixed with toasted flour to absorb moisture, then buried under a blanket of sugar, as if to anticipate that they will symbolically rise from the grave like Jesus. Sometimes wheat berries are mixed with other seeds to emphasize fertility. Cypriot Turks make golifa with various mixed seeds, pomegranates, and nuts for the New Year. Russian Christmas and New Year are marked with sochivo, whereas the similar kutya or kutia is traditional in Ukraine, Belarus, and some parts of Poland. Both incorporate poppy seeds as a symbol of abundance. See poppy seed.
A legend attributes the origin of Turkish aşure to Noah’s Ark. The sweet is believed to have been created with whatever food remained on board once the ark finally reached shore after the flood, which explains why in rural Anatolia the dish is also referred to as şükran çorbası (thanksgiving soup). Aşure’s name derives from the word ʿāshūrāʾ, which means “tenth” in Arabic, indicating the date on which it is traditionally prepared, the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. This date also marks the tragedy of Kerbela, when the Prophet’s grandsons were killed, making it a day of lamentation for Turkey’s Alevi Muslims. A different wheat-berry legend may be found in Sicily, where cuccìa di Santa Lucia is prepared to honor the Festa di Santa Lucia on 13 December, when ships loaded with grain suddenly appeared in the harbor after the long famine of 1582.
Sprouting wheat for Christmas, St. Lucia’s Day, St. Barbara’s Day, and Nowruz (the Persian New Year) is customary to symbolize the rebirth of nature. The sprouted berries adorn the table along with dried fruits and nuts. For Nowruz, a potent brown paste called sümenek (semeni, samani, samanak) is prepared by boiling down freshly pounded sprouted wheat.
See also birth; funerals; and judaism.
whisks and beaters are implements used to incorporate air into batters, eggs, and cream. Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, a bundle of twigs, a wooden spoon, or a knife blade was the traditional kitchen tool used for the arduous chore of beating eggs “to a raging foam” or whipping cream to firm peaks. An illustration in the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1580) depicts a kitchen worker using a large whisk, while the patisserie equipment plate in Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopedie (1765) resembles a miniature broom. A recipe for a cake baked annually in nineteenth-century American Shaker communities to commemorate the birthday of the sect’s founder, Ann Lee, instructs the cook to “Cut a handful of peach twigs which are filled with sap at this season of the year. Clip the ends and bruise them and beat the cake batter with them. This will impart a delicate peach flavor to the cake.”
The “Dover” eggbeater, first manufactured by the Dover Stamping Company in the 1870s, won the hearts of generations of American cooks with its double-geared cast-iron wheels and tin-plated blades that revolved in opposite directions. levi szekeres
Early cookbooks describe the beating procedure. In a recipe titled “To Ice a Large Cake” in The American Domestic Cookery (1823), Maria Eliza Rundell advised beating the whites of 20 fresh eggs, adding sugar, orange flower water, and lemon peel, and whisking the flavored egg whites “for three hours till the mixture is thick and white, then with a thin, broad bit of board spread it all over the top and sides.” Frederick Nutt, in The Complete Confectioner (1807), recommended beating egg yolks and sugar with a wooden spoon until “they blow up in bladders of wind,” then whisking the whites in a copper pan “till they are almost strong enough to bear an [unshelled] egg,” while Amelia Simmons, in American Cookery (1796), pronounced the whites ready when a silver 25-cent piece remained on top.
The Philadelphia cookbook writer Eliza Leslie thought “there is nothing so good” for beating as willow rods, and in Miss Leslie’s New Receipts for Cooking (1854) she offered helpful hints for reducing fatigue: “Do not use your elbow, but keep it close to your side. Move only your hand at the wrist, and let the stroke be quick, short, and horizontal … persist till after the foaming has ceased … continue until the surface is smooth as a mirror.”
As the nineteenth century progressed, sturdy wire whisks and ingenious mechanical labor-saving devices appeared in ever-increasing numbers in England and America. Tinsmiths produced flat and balloon-shaped wire whisks, and designs for revolving, oscillating, and agitating beaters began to flow into the patent office. “The present is truly the age of invention,” wrote one newspaper editor in a testimonial praising the new Hale Aerating eggbeater, patented in 1866. “It so readily performs the operation … that one half the eggs generally required is saved.” The Hale beater was a tin cylinder with a plunger in which the eggs were churned, the action filling them with tiny globules of air. Other manufacturers introduced box-like tin beaters with a crank handle, as well as revolving wire beaters encased in a glass jar, but the breakthrough design was a revolving interlacing beater that cut through the glazy albumen of the egg rather than literally beating it.
Although there were several patents granted in the 1860s, the Dover Stamping Company in the 1870s was the first to manufacture on a large scale the new-style beater with double geared cast-iron wheels and tin-plated blades that revolved in opposite directions. Leading culinary experts eagerly endorsed the “Dover.” Marion Harland, who devoted a whole chapter of her book Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea (1875) to eggbeaters, praised the Dover, writing, “If I could not get another I would not sell mine for fifty dollars or a hundred.” In The Home Cookbook, compiled by Chicago Ladies for the benefit of a home for the friendless in 1875, a latter-day Patrick Henry declared, “As long as there are eggs to beat, give me Dover or give me death.” Although it inspired dozens of imitations, like Baby Bingo, the Merry Whirl, and the Cyclone, it was the Dover that won the hearts of generations of American cooks.
However, not everyone endorsed the Dover. A century before Julia Child brandished a whisk during a television interview promoting her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), professional cooks were extolling the whisk’s merits. Pierre Blot, the transplanted French chef who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and founded the first French cooking school in America, wrote in Handbook of Practical Cookery (1867) that he had tried five different kinds of beaters before a large audience in Boston, but “not one could beat eggs as well as a common hand beater,” meaning the wire whisk, illustrated in his book.
When the twentieth century ushered in the age of electricity, both the whisk and the Dover lay forgotten in kitchen drawers. The first patent for a power mixer was granted in 1885, but it was not until after World War I that the Hobart Company marketed the KitchenAid mixer with a bowl on its own stand. The mixer worked on the principle of planetary action: a single beater traveled around the bowl in one direction while the bowl rotated on its axis in the opposite direction.
Today, even with a vast array of electric aids, many cooks, like Blot and Julia Child before them, prefer the hand-held whisk. Contemporary designs, often in a rainbow of colors, with easy-to-clean silicone wires, appeal to energetic cooks as an alternative to the whirring motor of a mixer. The basic configuration is a long stainless-steel or wooden handle holding flexible wire loops.
Variations abound; the balloon is a favorite, a shape that easily conforms to the concave sides of a mixing bowl. Also popular are the French, an elongated version of the balloon; the double-looped butterfly; and the ball, with individual straight wires with tiny balls at the tip attached to the handle. Now it is no longer “Give me Dover…. ” Cooks can select from a world of whisks to whip up a glossy meringue or beat eggs to a raging foam.
whoopie pie is formed from two palm-sized rounds of chocolate sponge cake filled with a white frosting, made either of confectioner’s sugar, which is beaten with shortening, or marshmallow frosting. Associated strongly with Maine and Pennsylvania, where they are sometimes called “gobs,” whoopie pies first gained popularity in early-twentieth-century Maine as a bakery-made treat. They were later adopted by home cooks.
Competing claims for the invention of whoopie pies clutter their history. Early-twentieth-century cocoa or baking chocolate manufacturers popularized so-called Devil’s food cakes, the very opposite of the then-stylish, egg-white raised angel food cake. Devil’s food was the obvious source for the name Devil Dog, the white-frosting-filled, chocolate hot dog–shaped cake treat trademarked by New Jersey–based Drake’s Cakes in 1926. Probably desiring a competitive product, and possibly inspired by the Amish gobs, the Berwick Baking Company, based in Roxbury, Massachusetts, apparently developed whoopie pies to avoid infringing Drake’s trademark, and by 1931 it was advertising them throughout New England by that name.
In the 1930s the Durkee-Mower Company, manufacturer of Marshmallow Fluff, issued a cookbook titled The Yummy Book, which contained a whoopie pie recipe attributed to the Amish. The recipe caught on, and home cooks make whoopie pies to this day. The treat is also sold in bakeries, mom-and-pop stores, gas stations, and convenience stores all over Maine and the New England region.
Whoopie pies are the official Maine treat, and the town of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, celebrates an annual Maine Whoopie Pie Festival on Whoopie Pie Day, the fourth Saturday in June. Whoopie pies now vary widely in the type of cake and the flavors of filling they use.
See also angel food cake; marshmallow fluff; small cakes; and sponge cake.
Winnie-the-Pooh, a loveable bear from children’s literature, climbed stickily into posterity in 1926 as he headed for a buzzing noise that he knew would yield honey. See honey. Inspired by a London Zoo bear from Canada named Winnie, who had a taste for sweetened condensed milk, Winnie-the-Pooh was created by the author A. A. Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard. In a series of books the two portrayed Pooh not only as Christopher Robin’s cherished toy, but also as the embodiment of childhood delights. The bear’s exploits, translated into over 50 languages, including Latin, spawned a Disney character and adult works like The Tao of Pooh.
For Pooh, “the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” His search for sweets is a universally comforting quest, his plumpness evidence of a honey obsession. Pooh’s proclivity for honey would have been familiar to British children, who knew the substance as a teatime sweetener and sickroom remedy. It is not surprising that Pooh’s adventures to satisfy his taste for a “goloptious full-up pot” of HUNNY should have stuck with generations of children, and their parents, like honey on a spoon. Honey, to Pooh, symbolizes life’s sweetness: “A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.” Pooh is never satiated, anticipating the happiness promised by his favorite sweet even more than he does the ultimate licking of “a little smackerel” of honey from his paws. For it turns out that Pooh is a philosopher whose worldview coincides with the Taoist idea that awareness of the process is as fulfilling as the reward: “Because, although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were.”