With Christmas being just over five weeks away, and faced with a quieter weekend than normal, it seemed an opportune moment to make this year’s Christmas cake.
The food historian Annie Grey in her book At Christmas we feast: festive food through the ages (2021) notes that what we think of as Christmas cake was originally eaten on Twelfth Night, 6th January, and was called ‘Twelfth Cake’. Starting off as a spicy fruity yeasted bread in the Middle Ages, by the 18th century it resembled what we now call Christmas Cake: a heavily fruited sweet cake (without yeast) adorned with marzipan and icing. Reference to Twelfth Cakes can be found in that quintessential Christmas novel, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
What we know as Christmas cake also appears in English literature from the 19th century to the present. In Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre the protagonist joins in the making of Christmas cakes as a mark of her identity as a financially independent woman and as a sign of her love and gratitude for her newly discovered family, the Rivers.
In Alice Munro’s short story ‘Queenie’, first published in 1998, the making of a Christmas cake whilst also marking the cook’s financial independence is overshadowed by an unhappy marriage and the threat of domestic violence (very fittingly she ends up throwing away the cake).
And in Claire Keegan’s wonderful 2022 novella Small Things Like These the central character, Bill Furlong, his wife and their five daughters all come together to make the family Christmas cake.
Christmas cake: a tradition, a symbol of family, togetherness and generosity, and just so delicious. I hope you enjoy making yours as much as I enjoyed making mine.
Thank you for the nudge, Becky; I’ll try to fit it in this week somehow! Might not look as beautiful as yours, which looks splendid.
Thanks Angela – I’m sure yours will be wonderful too x