The New Cake Forms of the Stove Era

The cut cake squares and the large square or round cake loaves that marched in a line down the center of antebellum party tables became far less fashionable in Victorian America. In part, this was because America had entered its legendary Gilded Age, when grandiloquent Frenchified styles of cooking, dining, and entertaining were in vogue among the wealthy and their middle-class imitators, and tastes in home decor ran to the Gothic baronial. Cake squares and plain loaves of cake were too unprepossessing to cut a figure in a mahogany-stuffed Victorian dining room. And in part, the issue was the cake. When cut into squares and piled, the flimsy, crumbly new butter cakes looked ragged and tended to squash and stick together. And a hulking slice cut from a large butter cake loaf was less than a treat. The cake’s plainness and cheapness, conveniently repressed, were forcefully brought to mind by its choking dryness.