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WEDDING CAKE. Wedding cakes are elaborate constructions, each standing for a particular marriage and each used in the wedding that establishes it. The link between cake and wedding, the distinctiveness of its form, its derived uses, and the meanings attached to it have all been most complexly and influentially developed in the English-speaking world. A classic form was commercially established in Britain and the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. An exceptionally large, rich fruit cake, as much as twelve inches in diameter and twenty pounds in weight, was used as a base for pillars supporting a similar but smaller cake. A third, still smaller cake layer was mounted on another set of pillars above that. The three tiers were each covered with hard white "royal" icing, which also was used for a characteristically formal decoration of piped icing. The whole was crowned with flowers, natural or in a variety of artificial materials, or a limited range of other appropriate ornamentation that might also adorn the sides. This form traveled widely in the course of the twentieth century and was modified locally in relation to changing tastes and the development of new decorative potentials and uses. Though the classic form was especially tenacious in Britain, the knowledge of alternatives, contributed by different European traditions, spread with increasing rapidity. The significance of the cake shifted from representing marriage as a fixed reality into which each couple entered to representing the individuality and even originality of the couple celebrating.

Historic Sources

The classic form had three sources, the use of loaves at Christian marriage rites, the appearance of "subtleties" and later sugar sculpture in medieval and Renaissance banquets in Europe, and the development of the English form of the substance "cake," mainly in the seventeenth century. Decorated loaves had been carried to the church in pre-Reformation wedding processions to be blessed and then returned to be eaten at a popular celebration following. Possibly earlier, and certainly later, there were baked but unleavened items more like Scottish oatcakes and shortbread: the "infare cake" is well known in the literature. These cakes were to be broken over the bride's head and/or eaten at the marriage feast. How widespread such practices were is not known, but these were among the variety of things to which the term "bride cake" has been applied over the centuries.

A clearer continuity is represented by the rich fruitcake developed in England by a process of enriching breads with sugar, spices, and dried fruits. The transformation was achieved by the mid-seventeenth century, providing a luxury that might be baked for wedding celebrations in the homes of the wealthy. Icing for cakes followed, and in 1769 a Manchester confectioner, Elizabeth Raffald, included the recipe for an iced "bride cake" in her cookery book, The Experienced English Housekeeper. This recipe was for a distinctive rich fruitcake covered with two layers of icing, a naturally pale yellow almond icing encased in a hard outer layer of plain white icing. Over the next century this became the distinguishing formula for British celebration cakes of increasing variety.

The subtleties of medieval Europe were, like modern wedding cakes, display items designed to impress and amaze as well as to be at least marginally consumable as food. The tradition culminated in the production of sugar sculpture for some of the greatest court festivities of the Renaissance period. They had no specific link with wedding feasts, but when revived in the enthusiasm for historic forms and styles in the nineteenth century, they acquired it. Led by the British royal establishment, for the weddings of Queen Victoria's children superstructures of sugar architecture and sculpture were raised on bases of cake, transforming them into tall centerpieces for the tables of wedding banquets. The decoration was characteristically white, and made symbolic references to the royal alliance. By the end of the century their example had stimulated leading baker-confectioners and enthusiasts for the art of piping into commercial developments leading directly to the three-tier classic. Typically only wealthy customers could initially afford the product, but in the course of the following half-century it became the standard for all.

Meanings and Uses

The classic form of the cake was impersonal, excluding written inscriptions or any direct reference to the personal tastes or interests of the couple marrying. Decorative motifs were confined to the most genteel of references to love and constancy. White, and if not white, silver, predominated. The cake was indeed a prime component of the white wedding. This, though it has not been well studied, appears to have developed at a period when public attention was increasingly drawn to sex and when, among the respectable classes, embarrassment on this score in the context of marrying was strong. The formality of the white wedding and of the style of the classic cake with it was, it has been argued, a strategy for diverting attention from the sexual implications of marrying to the decorous purity of the bride.

The cake acquired a particular relationship with the bride in two ways. It was heir to popular traditions that centered weddings on the transition the bride was making. As noted above, this sometimes involved breaking baked items over the heads of brides. Unmarried young people often obtained fragments to dream on to discover their own life partners. The second link arose when cakes spread more widely in the social scale in the midnineteenth century, from the aristocratic wedding banquet to the modest domestic wedding breakfast. In this new context, the bride in her new married status was called on to cut the cake for her guests. Cut pieces could then take on the old use for divination. In the twentieth century cake cutting became one of the major popular rites of marrying, but it developed into a joint action by the new husband and wife together. In Japan this theme was developed to the exclusion of edibility. The joint insertion of a knife into a slot in an enormous wax cake provided a striking photo opportunity as part of a complex sequence developed in commercial wedding halls. In the United States a mutual feeding of cake by bride and groom extended the symbolic use in another direction.

More esoteric meanings have at times been discovered for the wedding cake and its uses. The complexity of the classic form and its apparently traditional nature often encouraged speculation on the contrast between the dark interior and the whiteness of the exterior and on the meaningfulness of ingredients and their flavors. The almond, appearing in one layer of icing as well as in the mixture inside, attracted particular attention. Most spectacular has been the identification of the white, tiered cake with the bride in her wedding costume and the joint cutting of the cake as a symbolic consummation of the marriage. As forms have diversified, the scope for such symbolic interpreting has declined.

Simon Charsley