Cake: Election Cake

One of the best excuses for a large party in colonial times involved elections: all of the colonies enjoyed some degree of elected representation, whether for legislators or even governors. Traveling to polling places over seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roads could be arduous, however, and men tended to stay in the polling towns for several days to await the result and to socialize with distant neighbors. Among the foods served at these mass gatherings were grandly proportioned, yeasted “great cakes” similar to ones that the colonists’ English forbearers had baked for religious and folk festivals. Particularly in the Puritan and Congregationalist North, secular holidays like Election Day substituted for religious holidays like Epiphany or Christmas. The cakes associated with these Catholic and Anglican rites in the Old World were applied to secular gatherings in America.