The Early English Roots of American Cake

The story of American cake began with the yeast-raised “spice cakes” of seventeenth-century England. Essentially white breads enriched with butter and eggs and embellished with raisins, spices, and a touch of costly sugar, these cakes tasted something like today’s raisin bread, except richer and denser. First emerging in early Tudor times, spice cakes had become so popular in England by the early seventeenth century that government authorities, straining to rationalize bread prices, forbade the bread bakers to produce them except on holidays such as Christmas and Easter. This did not staunch the flow. Taverns baked the small saffron-raisin spice cakes, sometimes called buns, that people liked to nibble with ale, while the wealthy instructed their own cooks to confect the buttery, crumbly caraway-studded cakes fashionable for evening get-togethers. And from the capacious ovens of manor, church, and university bake houses issued the gargantuan celebratory spice cakes called “great cakes,” weighing fifty pounds or more. At the manor, these fabled cakes were the highlights of weddings and of the many community agrarian festivals staged under manor auspices such as harvest and sheep-shearing; churches featured the cakes at fund-raising feasts called “ales”; and universities brought the cakes forth on commencement day to rowdy crowds of drunken students.