Wedding Cake! Is There Anything New Under The Sun?
By: Vlady Peters
Living in those areas of the world, and those historical times, where obesity rather than malnutrition is likely to figure in our conversation, it might be difficult to understand the preoccupation with food that figures so largely in all our celebrations.
In particular, the wedding cake, which more often than not is largely for display, does make one wonder. If it’s a fruit cake, you can be certain that as large a proportion of the guests will hate it, as love it. And the same goes for any other flavour.
The idea of celebrating any event with food is a tradition which comes from a time when you had to do a lot more for your food than go to the corner store or the supermarket. For the poor working on the estates of their betters, a wedding at the big house could mean a little bit of meat for the first time in months, or a drink that you could actually swallow without doing damage to the lining of your stomach.
When the idea of a celebratory cake first entered the wedding arena, it was little more than a bun, often broken over the bride’s head to wish her plenty in her life. To add a little more oomph to the action, if the cake broke into more than one piece, those present would prophesize that the number of pieces of cake denoted the number of off-springs the bride could hope for.
Somewhere along the way, a creative chef – I believe he was French and working for one of the kings – got the idea of making a masterpiece of a wedding cake by icing hundreds of little cakes into one large structure.
Of course a cake could hardly be considered a feast in its own right. It sat there in all its glory while the guests threw themselves on life-like structures of fowls such as geese in grapes and garlic sauce, peacocks decorated with their own feathers, fish staring coldly out of dead eyes, and boar heads with the inevitable apple in their mouths.
Only after satisfying their hunger did the guests turn towards the wedding cake which they tore with their hands.
Since then, of course, chefs all over the world have learned to make huge cake constructions without needing to resort to icing hundreds of little cakes and pretend it was just one cake. The only thing left now, was to find out how to cut such a cake without reducing it to crumbs.
After spending several centuries perfect this art, someone had a great idea. What if, instead of one huge cake needing to be mangled into smaller more edible pieces, the whole cake was constructed of small, individual cakes for each guest to pick? Wouldn’t it be so much more convenient?
Definitely. Even as we speak, chefs are supplying, as wedding cakes, individual meringue nests filled with fruit and cream, cup cakes decorated with a guest’s name, and buns with icing to die for.
I guess it’s a matter of what goes round, comes round.
Vlady Peters is an Australian Civil Marriage Celebrant authorised to perform marriages in Australia. She also perform general ceremonies such as Baby Naming, Renewal of Vows and Commitment Ceremonies. To learn more about her as a celebrant and an author visit Vlady at http://www.weddings-celebrant.com