A brief journey through history in the context of cake

How old is the birthday cake? Over three thousand years, as those would have us believe who have traced its origin back to a cult homage to one of the Goddesses of the Moon, Artemis, Hecate or Selene whose birthday was celebrated on the sixth day of each month? A cake made from flour and honey, round to symbolise the moon, would indeed appear to be the ancestor of our much-loved birthday cake. It was offered to divinity. Sorts of lights were placed on top, ancestors of our candles. Laypersons even wrote about “candles”, unaware that candles were not invented until the 19th century. More informed people spoke about tapers, but since the fi re on tapers was fuelled by beef or sheep suet, we could rightly wonder what taste such a cake would have.

However, birthdays, as we understood the term, did not exist in the antique world per se. We would celebrate the day of the protective spirit of a person, or of his family, clan, or tribe, his daemon or genius, and not his date of birth. Just as in Catholic countries, the day of the saint whose person bears the name is celebrated. For a long time, the birthday was only really known in sufficiently rich and cultivated circles to have a notion of calendar other than that indicated by the passing seasons.

In fact, the first recognised birthday cake appeared in 1802, for the 53rd birthday of German poet Goethe. We know that, out of a concern for the astral theme, he had carefully noted this date. Becoming famous, he gained the custom of celebrating its passing, and allowed himself some luxury such as joining his birthday (August 28) together with that of philosopher Herder (August 25), his son (also 28), the Grand Duke (September 3), and his publisher Christoph Wieland (September 5), so much so that at the Court of Saxony-Weimar, these celebrations became a real summer festival.

The fact that there was an abundance of cakes for the occasion went without saying. Cakes have become an accessory for festivals in the West since the Middle Ages. At the Court of the Pope in Avignon, the King of France or Duke of Burgundy, from the 14th century, “decorated desserts” were served and were more decorative than they were edible. Pastry and sugar-coated fortresses, fountains or naves were made to celebrate, not a birthday, but a mythical event or otherwise, such as the taking of Jerusalem or Troy for instance, or simply for a marriage banquet.

Let us jump ahead five centuries, during the reign of Emperor Napoleon, to Antonin Carême, the cook of Talleyrand who survived all changes in the regime, serving Tsar Alexandre I, the future George V of England, Austrian Emperor François I and, finally, James de Rothschild. We are well aware of his famous aphorism: “There are five fine arts: painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture which has the primary branch of pastry-making”. He invented the multi-tiered cake, inspired by Palladio and Hubert Robert to create temples or evoke their ruins, using sugar, almond pastry and pastry.

But he cannot be credited with the idea of the pop-out cake, a cake where a person would jump out and which would become, at the end of the 19th century a must-have for boy’s birthday meals. The date is May 20 1895 and a lady burst out of a cake singing a tune to surprise New York architect Stanford White. The pop-out cake became an accessory of luxury birthday parties throughout the 20th century. With its variations. In the film Some Like It Hot by Billy Wilder, it was a gangster who jumped out of the cream to shoot the gathering. In 1965, for his wife’s birthday, actress Britt Ekland, the unforgettable performer of the Pink Panther Peter Sellers, came out of the cake behind the wheel of a Mini-Cooper.

US Presidents would have the size of the cake served on their birthday increased as the power of the country expanded. Where Roosevelt and Truman made do with a simple two-tier cake, on 19th May 1962 at Madison Square Garden, John Kennedy was offered the reproduction of a Greek temple with the arms of the Republic, totally decorated in red, blue and white, and carried by caryatids. However, eyes only fell on the colour of the dress worn,  by the person singing “Happy Birthday Mister President”, none other than Marilyn Monroe…