Cakes are sometimes considered a medieval creation, but food writer and cook Alice Zaslavsky says they have been decorating dinner tables since the time of the pyramids.
There are references to versions of what we now know as cake on the walls of the tombs of ancient Egypt, as well as in ancient Greek and Roman texts, he says.
And the pastry, that delicious thing that attracts many of us to the cake today, was often taken out in previous centuries of its existence.
“It was more like a bowl,” Ms. Zaslavsky tells ABC RN’s Life Matters.
Medieval pastry chefs didn’t have to worry about the taste of their pastry: it wasn’t for food. (Image: The Bodleian Library, Oxford / Public Domain)
In fact, the crust, formerly called a “coffin,” was hard, thick, heavy, and inedible, says Jacqui Newling, adjunct historian and gastronomic and curator of Sydney’s living museums.
“The crust was kind of a container, if you will, in which the food would be cooked,” he says.
Over time, thankfully, the hard dough was refined and made lighter and more delicious with the addition of animal fat.
“Then you started eating the pastry,” Dr. Newling says.
But initially, that coffin crust made the cake perfectly portable.
“The casing was very handy for people traveling or working remotely,” says Dr. Newling.
A raised cake with a thick crust “helped prevent the contents from turning off.”
This Mowbray pork pie, with its high crust, is a good example of a high pie. (Getty: Bloomberg)
In the 1830s, for example, it took up to four days to go from Sydney to Hunter Valley on foot or even on horseback, if the weather was bad enough.
So a meal that could be wrapped, stuffed into a backpack and taken out at will was very appealing.
How cakes came into Australia
Food historian Jan O’Connell notes that the word “foot” entered the English language in the 14th century.
Around 1387, Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales of a Chef who “koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and fye / Máken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.”
Ms. Zaslavsky, also author of In Praise of Veg, says the origin of the word “cake” could be related to the fact that, to create one, almost anything could be wrapped in pastry and cooked.
The word could have been adopted from the older word “heron” because “the heron collects a lot of things and puts them in its nest” in the same way that “people would pick up whatever could be allowed and put it in a pastry shop, ”he says. .
Cakes grew to be very popular in Britain, before the concept reached Australia. Here, “the idea of making cakes came with the First Fleet,” says Dr. Newling, who is also the author of Eat Your History.
He points to the reference in the 1788 magazine by George Worgan, a First Fleet surgeon and “very gourmand.”
In the newspaper entry, Worgan describes a convict who wants to make a cake for his wedding celebration.
“A good goat … was found dead and some of the fleshy parts cut, and today two men were arrested on suspicion of killing this goat and have made a cake out of it,” he writes.
Worgan goes on to explain that one of the men, who was getting married the next day, had wanted to “make a cake for the wedding dinner.”
“I think it’s a very beautiful story because it proves it [the pie] it was something that would be celebrated, ”says Dr. Newling.
But it was also an affordable food option. Back then, flour and meat were part of the convicts ’rations,“ because any convict could make a cake, ”he says.
The early Australian convicts had rations, such as salted meat, flour and butter, that could be used to make a cake. (Image: NSW State Library)
He greets the man from the flying cake
After it reached our shores, the cake grew in popularity in Australia.
The cakes were included in the King’s birthday party organized by Governor Phillip on June 4, 1788.
And in the 1840s there was even a cake celebrity.
The “flying cake man” was a popular identity who sold cakes on Sydney docks. The newspapers of the time describe him as “animating Parramatta” with his “dowries for making cakes” and “musical cries.”
Since then, Dr Newling says the savory cake has become “iconic” in Australia.
Night gamblers in an Adelaide cake cart in 1974, participating in a food tradition open to all. (Trove: Australian Women’s Weekly)
Its practicality, and the fact that it can be eaten by hand, without a plate and without cutlery, explain in a way why.
“It talks about our kind of feeling of not having to be chained by all the accessories you need to eat a meal, like a sandwich, you can eat on the go,” says Dr. Newling.
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As early as the mid-19th century, cake vendors strolled through the crowds to cricket matches in Hyde Park and other places where people gathered for sporting events, he says.
“It was a good snack while you were out.
“It’s actually street food.”
The cake is as mobile as it is earthy. And he is not alone.
“Many of us [Australian] Food traditions are certainly egalitarian, they are open to everyone, ”says Dr. Newling.
And according to those traditions, he says the cake “cuts the class.”
There were – and still are – very elegant cakes that were on the formal tables, like an “elevated cake with an ornate and decorated top” as “a way to show off your wealth and nobility.”
But he says many others could – and can – enjoy the cake “as a fairly rudimentary but simple and portable dish.”
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