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Wedding cakes are so packed with symbolism it is hard to know where to begin.
—Michael Krondl, Sweet Invention
Wedding cake rituals are bound up with symbols of fertility, with seeds and grains symbolically added to breads and cakes. Early European cakes were dense affairs, comprising dried fruit and nuts and often not baked, merely cooked over an open flame, like a flatbread. The white layered confection known today is a fairly modern invention.
Medieval subtleties, those sculptures crafted for the tables of the aristocracy, were often broken into pieces at the end of a feast, with guests invited to crack off a section to take home as a sort of party favor. Sugar sculptures were especially prized, as sugar was thought to be particularly exotic, having come from the Caribbean or Africa.1 Like many modern wedding cakes, they were made less for consumption than for the “theater” and as a type of entertainment if impressive enough.
The story of the modern wedding cake begins with the colossal cake made for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840. At the time of their marriage, London had recently weathered a politically volatile summer of riots and violence, as well as controversy over Victoria marrying a German. It would not do to have a cake that could be construed as “German” while an already nervous Parliament wondered how it would control the mobs anxious to witness a royal wedding.2
The massive cake was festooned with a sugar sculpture of Britannia (the female figure who stands in as the physical embodiment of Britain). A dog at Britannia’s feet represented faithfulness, with sculptures of the bride and groom, amid fluttering turtledoves, draped safely in classical Roman garb (lacking any modern ethnic context). The cake, carted outside the palace among clamoring crowds, was more than nine feet in circumference and became a public curiosity and center of attention.3
Throngs pressed to glimpse the royal couple, while uneasy authorities held their breath and waited to see if the crowd would turn unruly. Onlookers who failed to catch a peek of the royal couple were still assured an eyeful (and possibly a mouthful) of the huge patriotic cake. National pride, spurred by this enormous and most British of offerings, carried the day. That the confection was made of English plums with traditional British ingredients signaled that this couple would together be entirely “English.” There was nothing German about this cake, and there would be nothing German about the way these monarchs ruled.4 This cake, coated with very heavy white icing (it had to be sturdy to withstand the attentions of the multitudes), gave rise to the term “royal icing.”
Victoria’s very public cake served to heighten the role of wedding cakes ever after, an interest fanned by the eventual marriages of her nine children, each of whom married nobility. Their nuptial celebrations would also feature extravagant cakes. Queen Victoria’s cake had been gigantic, though it consisted of merely a single layer. With nowhere to go but up, her oldest daughter, Vicky, who married Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia, boasted a six-foot-high dessert tiered with pearls and multiple columns. The couple’s respective coats of arms and profiles were accompanied by cupids sculpted of sugar, all housed under an enormous candy crown.5
Many consider a wedding without a cake almost illegal.
—Good Housekeeping 126, no. 6 (June 1948): 206
Fruit cakes were the norm for Western weddings until the end of the nineteenth century, but once manufacturers could provide inexpensive processed white flour and refined granulated sugar, cookbooks usually offered two versions: the “bride’s cake” (light with white frosting) and the “wedding cake” (heavy fruit cake). The fruit cake became interchangeable with the groom’s cake. The lighter, sweeter bride’s cake developed into the wedding portrait opportunity now known so well.
Simon Charsley, a Scottish social anthropologist, has surmised that wedding cakes have become a visual cornerstone and an iconic symbol for marriage more than a food item. Their ritual slicing, more than their eating, defines them.6 Charsley, among others, supposes that the whiteness of refined sugar in modern cakes symbolizes virginity, with the bride’s purity ritually severed by the slicing of the cake by the newlyweds.
Yet, as noted food historian Michael Krondl states, cakes have not always been white, and the rituals concerning them have not always been particularly refined. In one tradition, the bride holds a ring out while the groom thrusts bits of cake through it, with the little pieces next eaten by the bridesmaids.7 Instances of “cake breaking,” in which bread or cake is broken or crumbled on a bride’s head, is evident in numerous cultures. Charsley remarks that the ring ritual and the cake-cutting ceremony are significant in that the bride participates in them rather than having something done to her.8 It is also notable that this cutting is witnessed by family members, the bride’s virginity publicly negated in a ceremony presumably arranged or paid for by her father.
The first English-speaking colonists were confounded by the curious foods of the New World and distressed by the lack of familiar ingredients. They especially yearned for wheat to make bread and cakes. Corn was considered a lowly “swine” crop, despite being hardy and easy to grow.9 But the colonists did learn to value corn and soon produced cookbooks that helped ensure the welfare of the next batch of New World arrivals.
Recipes and first aid were intertwined, and early cookbooks acted as all-encompassing survival guides for running a home, particularly for a colonist lacking experienced family members nearby to act as tutors. A glance at the index of Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife (a best seller in 1844) shows a recipe for Indian pudding just before an antidote for “inflamed wounds,” and a lobster recipe resides next to a cure for lockjaw.10 The White House Cook Book of 1913 included recipes to cure nosebleeds, constipation, fainting, and bad breath. It also offered methods to destroy ants, cure hiccups, and remove freckles.11 And nestled in with lifesaving advice, there were always wedding cake recipes.
The home economists working to standardize American cuisine were starchy and fussy, attributes perhaps terrifying to a new bride first learning to cook or to a recent immigrant already flummoxed by a new world. The folksy Betty Crocker was “born” in 1921 to sell Gold Medal Flour for the Washburn Crosby Company (later General Mills). The account manager regularly received letters asking for cooking advice, and, with an all-male advertising staff, he routinely turned to his female office and factory workers for solutions. He in turn responded anonymously, although he soon recognized the appeal of a personal approach—hence, the genesis of the Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. Consumers could now feel they were getting cooking advice from a real person, and the Betty Crocker character was accessible and a marvel of marketing finesse.
Betty’s image for use in packaging was carefully fabricated, and her face made its first appearance in 1937 on Softasilk cake flour. Nothing about her was an accident. The name Betty was chosen to sound “cheery, wholesome, and folksy,” and even the signature affixed to her letters and boxes, still used today, resulted from a company drive to find the most pleasing design.12
Dozens of home economists, hired to play Betty Crockers, answered mail and crisscrossed the country giving cooking shows. Entire town populations turned out just to see the elaborate kitchen stage setup.13 It was a secret, of course, that no true Betty existed, and the character was regularly inundated with love letters and marriage proposals. Betty received valentines and gifts from bachelors enamored of this woman who could cook and sew and seemingly answer any question.14
Trouble brewed when the secrecy of the company fanned public speculation that Betty was hiding something, and a rumor erupted that she was quitting and getting married. Betty took out a full-page ad, proclaiming, “Instead of practicing making biscuits for a husband, I’m afraid I will have to be content doing my cooking in the Gold Medal Kitchen.”15 Betty would remain single and devote her life to America. She would be sorely needed as the country faced the Depression and then endured food rationing in another war.
Meta Given’s 1949 Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking was a whopping volume that taught how to cook bear, antelope, beaver, and opossum, how best to remove feathers and fur, and how to eviscerate a deer. In many ways, this was still how the country actually lived, and industry would have to be careful to not tamper with the ideals of home cooking. As early as the 1940s, the market included cake mixes that required only adding water, but sales were flat. Betty Crocker’s parents (General Mills) hired psychologists, who established that homemakers felt they had not “baked” if they only added water. The producers altered their formula so that cake mixes would also require eggs, and sales soon increased.16
The groom’s cake has retained its popularity in the South particularly, and it is often rich or chocolatey, a sort of antithesis to the white concoction sliced for the photographer. It is sometimes decorated to reflect hobbies or to pay homage to an alma mater or sports team. It is sliced after the wedding cake, with care usually taken to not compete with or deflect attention from the main attraction.
The South has preserved culinary traditions with enthusiasm, and ribbon pulls are a New Orleans specialty. As with the bouquet toss, unmarried females vie for the chance to divine their futures. Charms are embedded in or laid under the cake, and on cue bridesmaids or good friends pull out their charms. Typical charms include a ring for the next to marry, a button for an “old maid,” an anchor for hope, and a horseshoe for luck. Companies produce individualized charms, including sterling ones to be kept on a charm bracelet. Although attributed to the French, the practice is, according to Simon Charsley, Scottish in origin, an offshoot of the ribbon “favors” given at weddings as keepsakes. These ribbons were once lightly attached to the bride’s dress and pulled off by her friends.17
Many cultures are known to bake coins or trinkets into breads and cakes, and the French did inspire Mardi Gras king cakes, which contain a bean or a small plastic baby. The recipient of the slice with the trinket becomes king or queen for the day and is expected to provide the cake for the next year. Charsley supposes the ribbons in New Orleans bridal cakes are probably an amalgamation of several such traditions.18
In early America, weddings were celebrated with “stack cakes.” Neighbors and friends all brought cakes, which were stacked on top of one another, “glued” together with a dollop of apple sauce.19
Wedding cakes do get a bad rap, not being known for their flavor, and research bears out that this is not a new phenomenon. In 1882 a Harper’s Bazaar columnist referred to wedding cake as “the black cement in which fossilized fruits, spices and slabs of gum-shellac are imbedded, and the plaster of Paris with which the indigestible and deadly edifice is crowned.”20 While the writer referred to the fruit cakes of a bygone era, there is no shortage of criticism of the dry and sugary offerings of lesser contemporary bakeries.
Once confectioners began to “pipe” icing through tubes, their creations became more detailed, and by the mid-1800s manufacturers were selling small metal funnels (pastry tips) and canvas bags to fill with icing.21 American candy maker Dewey McKinley Wilton started the Wilton School of Cake Decorating in 1929, and his business flourished. In 1948 his rosters swelled with veterans utilizing GI Bill benefits, and he began to market decorating tools now found in any pastry chef’s arsenal.22
The top tier of the wedding cake is often saved for other occasions, such as the couple’s future child’s christening or an anniversary. The small white boxes for housing the obligatory cake for guests to take home triggered an industry of their own. Cookbooks recommended wrapping slices in waxed paper and securing them with a ribbon, but monogrammed and specialized boxes were very fashionable, and some companies even supplied the fruit cake to include inside. A 1905 article in Good Housekeeping advised making homemade boxes and wrapping the cake in a small amount of fabric from the assembly of the wedding gown.
A 1949 ad beseeched brides to “preserve all the tradition” and reported that Emily Post had commented, “There are at all weddings of importance . . . little individual boxes of dark fruit cake.” In a nod to an increasingly industrialized society, this company’s boxes came prepacked with fruit cake inside, with an option to have them monogrammed.23
The availability of artificial flowers had an impact on cake designs, making it possible to keep a permanent wedding souvenir, often under a glass dome, for years after the event. Decorative flourishes no longer needed a vase in which to hold water, and modern manufacturing offered many new possibilities for making a cake look distinctive. Faux flowers, doves, rings, bells, and horseshoes began to perch on cakes, and clasped hands were a particular best seller.24
Cake toppers got less expensive as new manufacturing methods were able to mass-produce them. The popular Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog brought cake toppers into the mainstream, and during the 1940s the company did brisk business with figures in military uniform.25
Contemporary cake toppers are available in many configurations with the theme of sports, video games, ATVs, motorcycles, Dr. Who, fire-fighters, bicycles . . . the list goes on. Figures are often sold separately, so shoppers can mix and match, choosing two males or two females (there are brides in gowns or white pantsuits) or figures of the opposite sex, featuring a particular hair color or dress. Most companies offer a choice of skin tone, and there are bald grooms, sari-clad brides, and grooms in Nehru jackets. There are Jewish grooms wearing yarmulkes, Asian and Hispanic figures, “curvy” brides, “burly” grooms, and even pregnant brides. The “geek groom” surfaces a lot too, wearing glasses and pants a tad too short. Facial hair may be added for an additional $4. If that does not keep the couple busy, they can assemble their bridal party to march across their cake, and they may also be attended by a range of dog and cat breeds.
Numerous companies create custom figures using uploaded photos, and 3-D printers can make detailed replicas. Couples with great self-esteem may choose to commission cake figurines depicting themselves nude, as soccer star David Beckham and Spice Girl Victoria Adams did in 1999.
In 2005 African American wedding planner Rena Puebla cast around for an apropos topper for the cake at her wedding to a Japanese man. She could not find figures that actually resembled them and was put off by how the black figure looked like the white figure with dyed skin. She hired artists to create forms with accurate facial details, with attention to cheek bones, eyes, and nose. She formed a company, Renellie, which quickly sold out of figures.26
Much of the merchandise follows the theme of being “caught.” Various Western figures depict a bride roping a groom or a bride with a fishing pole and a groom with a hook in his back. There appears to be a dearth of grooms casting the marriage net; yet plenty look at their watches, as the brides have left a “gone shopping” sign. Perhaps the cake-topper industry lags behind the move for female equality or actually serves as an unspoken reflection of the bridal business as a whole?
Brides of the early 1900s cut the first slice, doling out portions first to their husbands and then to guests, simulating their new role as the family cook. As hiring of a professional wedding photographer became the norm in the 1950s, grooms were brought into the shot of the “cutting of the cake” as the couple fed each other a slice in a gesture of unity.
In the 1950s the Betty Crocker Junior Baking Kit came to the fore, featuring a portable, child-friendly oven and tiny boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix. A perusal of the EZ Bake Oven opportunities available in 2016 reveals that Betty is keeping up with the times. EZ Bake Oven videos feature enthusiastic tweens (clearly old enough to use a “real” oven”) and downloadable recipes for dishes that could be served at any contemporary wedding banquet: red velvet cupcakes, rockin’ pizza, pretzel “dippers,” and whoopee pies.27 In line with the prevalent need for everyone to be famous, the oven is advertised with the tag line “Lets kids feel like baking stars.”28
As weddings became more playful in the 1970s, the bride and groom began to smash the cake into each other’s faces, providing a “cute,” albeit now predictable, pose. This injection of whimsy into wedding culture is particularly apparent in modern wedding cake choices. Alternative cakes may be constructed of cake pops, pizza, wheels of cheese, or doughnuts. An Internet search will reveal more than one teetering cake made of waffles, bride and groom lovingly pouring on the maple syrup. Of course, bacon has found its way into every menu item possible, and Modern Bride recently featured a BLT cake offering with ranch-style frosting and tiny tomato slices.29
A lot can go wrong with cake productions such as this, and in 2013 a disgruntled bride tried to sell her wedding cake on eBay for $1.54, listing it as the “Ugliest Wedding Cake Ever.” It did not sell. In a more positive cake story, a man in Washington State discovered the top layer of a wedding cake in his attic in 2015. The fossilized cake was his grandmother’s, hailing from 1915.30
Both Papa John’s and Pizza Hut have commissioned artists to create wedding portraits on the surface of their pizzas, and Pinterest will show more than one version of meat cakes, with steaks or burgers layered with mashed potatoes and white gravy.
“Naked” cakes, so named because they lack icing, have made inroads in popularity, as have “drip” cakes, which feature a drizzle of ganache or caramel cascading down the sides. One 2016 poll suggests that nontraditional cakes such as these live mostly on social media, the stars of Pinterest and Instagram, while the majority of couples still crave a traditional iced cake.31
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, weddings are known for their cookie tables. Family members bake and freeze cookies for months in advance, all in anticipation of loading a banquet table with hundreds and hundreds of cookies. The cookie table is a unique Pittsburgh custom, with locals reporting that it is more important than the wedding cake. The cookies are always homemade, with families known for particular types; lady locks (small pastry tubes with cream filling, similar to cannolis) are a regional favorite.
The cookie table is thought to be derived from the area’s early Greek or Italian settlers. As many households contributed, it reduced the cost of a wedding and served as an alternative to an expensive wedding cake. In any case, it is a communal custom, and modern wedding hosts routinely provide personalized to-go containers or custom bags for guests to take cookies home. Pittsburgh claims it as the city’s exclusive wedding tradition; yet Youngstown, Ohio, makes the same claim. An Ohio museum launched an exhibit on the latter’s cookie tables, and “Youngstown natives were more than a little miffed that the state on the east side of the Ohio line has been claiming that the tradition originated there.”32
One dessert, at least in name tied to weddings, are Maids of Honor, small tarts long established in England and Canada. Apparently Henry VIII witnessed Anne Boleyn’s ladies in waiting eating them. Fond of his food, the king demanded some and so liked them that he named them in the ladies’ honor. The London Maids of Honour Bakery, in existence from early in the eighteenth century, recounts the legend that the king so liked the treats that he had the recipe locked away in a secret box at Richmond Palace. There are even reports that the king imprisoned the lady who created the recipe, forcing her to cook the tarts only for him (although the bakery stops short of claiming this to be literally true).33
Brides do hope to be queen for a day, a sentiment surely embodied by modern celebrity unions. Imagine the cake served at the infamous 2002 wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. The twelve tiers that towered above their heads cost $40,000, making it one of the most expensive wedding cakes ever. It would seem that when Michael Jackson is the best man (and Elizabeth Taylor the matron of honor), no ordinary cake will do. Of course, Liz, with eight weddings under her belt, knew her way around the cake knife. In 1991, her six-tiered chocolate mousse cake comprised a large portion of the budget of her $2.5 million nuptials to construction worker Larry Fortensky.
The late 1800s saw the introduction of canned pineapples and, not coincidentally, America’s swift appropriation of Hawaii. The United States overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani and established the Republic of Hawaii. Soon it ensconced a president with the last name Dole (although only a cousin to the Dole Pineapple family), and the resources of the islands—all that fruit and all that sugar—came under total American control. Like bananas, pineapples, at least canned ones, became an American staple and did not join the eventual roster of luxury food items coveted for wedding feasts.
Sydney W. Mintz’s 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History traces the historical progression of sugar, detailing its evolution from amenity exclusive to the privileged to item of mass consumption in commercial goods. Mintz wrote that access to sugar became more important than its actual consumption, tracing how power is derived from access and, more important, how maintaining that power depends on exploiting the desires of others who want access as well. Roland Barthes, as discussed in this book’s introduction, positioned coffee as a luxury good that became an item imbued with meaning that could exemplify how a person desired to be perceived.
Ambitious dessert buffets have become standard at receptions, as have ice-cream sundae and cupcake bars. Yet the wedding cake retains its status. Guests often hesitate to leave before it has been cut. The sharing of the wedding cake, laden with symbolism, celebrates a shared life. The cupcake, by contrast, evokes nostalgia for childhood and is a sign of individuality. As Michael Krondl has posited, perhaps cupcakes are the ultimate symbol of a “selfie” generation?
Ostentatious displays were (and are) an important aspect in the pursuit of status and power, and sugar sculptures and elaborate exhibits of food were forerunners of extravagant wedding cakes.34 Elaborate wedding cakes, towering above our heads, bigger and sweeter than need be, are physical embodiments of conspicuous consumption that can literally be ingested.