Wedding Cakes and Cultural History

by Simon Charsley

Overview

First published in 1992, Wedding Cakes and Cultural History is a unique contribution to the anthropology of food, tracing the fascinating history of wedding cakes, from late medieval feasts and rites, through the Victorian wedding breakfast and into the 1990s. Dr. Charsley maps the intricate creation of the wedding cake and explores its uses and meanings. He shows that the wedding cake provides a vivid illustration of the traditions and traditional values inherent in all foods and demonstrates the part that material culture plays in the process of change. Challenging in its ideas, yet approachable in style and subject matter, this book will be of great interest to students and teachers of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781000653410
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Series:	Routledge Revivals
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	174
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Simon R. Charsley

Table of Contents

List of illustrations Foreword Preface 1. The British wedding cake in the late twentieth century 2. How distinctive is the British cake? 3. Cultural creation: myth, history and language 4. When the wedding cake was not yet and might never have been 5. Great cakes, plum(b) cakes and bride cakes 6. Confectionery and icing 7. The rise of the Victorian cake and its successors 8. Uses and their evolution 9. Meanings and interpretation 10. Towards a theory of cultural change? Postscript Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

``The earliest recipe recorded fromsic Britain for a dish specifically for a wedding is in fact a pie,'' writes Charsley, an anthropologist at the University of Glasgow. The wedding cake as we know it today--with its successively smaller layers, supporting pillars, fancy frosting and festoons--had its origins some hundred years later, in a confection that commemorated the marriage of one of Queen Victoria's daughters in 1859. Even then, a few refinements were missing: only the base tier was actually cake (the rest were pure sugar), and the layers were stacked like hat boxes. It would take the wedding of Prince Leopold in 1882 before guests could enjoy an entirely ``cake'' wedding cake, and another 20 years before the tiers were separated by columns (usually disguised pieces of a broom handle). There are many shrewd observations here, particularly those that link the evolving elaborateness of the wedding cakes to the growing commercialization of private ceremonies (most Victorian amateur bakers lacked the engineering skill to keep the higher layers from sinking into the lower ones). Charsley is also enlightening on the way the ritual of cake-cutting reflects the changing role of women in marriage. But general readers should be warned: Wedding Cakes is not a novelty item or gift book. Although Charsley's writing is relatively free of jargon, his book is clearly aimed at an academic audience; there is thorough documentation of such minutiae as flour proportion and the development of icing, and even the most intellectually inclined gourmands may quickly find that they have bitten off more than they can--or care to--chew. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly