THE HISTORY OF EASTER BAKING

THE HISTORY OF EASTER BAKINGOriginally Easter was called Pasha after the Hebrew word for Passover, a Jewish festival.
that happens at this time of year. It was replaced by Easter, a word which is believed to have evolved from Eostre, the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and springtime. The date of Easter is determined, like its pagan festival equivalent, by the lunar calendar.

Simnel cakeLent is the period of 40 days which comes before Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday. For many Christians, this is a period of fasting and repentance in preparation for Easter, culminating in a feast of seasonal and symbolic foods. In the late 17th century, girls in service brought a rich fruit cake called simnel cake home to their mothers on the fourth Sunday of Lent. The cake was enriched with marzipan and decorated with 11 marzipan balls representing the 12 apostles minus Judas, who betrayed Christ.

Hot cross bunsThe Greeks and Egyptians ate small cakes or buns in honour of the respective goddesses that they worshipped. Buns marked with a cross were eaten by the Saxons to honour their goddess Eostre - it is thought the bun represented the moon and the cross the moon's quarters. The Saxons also carved a symbol of an ox horn into their bread as part of the ritual. To Christians, the cross symbolises the crucifixion.
The hot cross bun can be seen to symbolise the Crucifixion - but in earlier and more superstitious times, bread was marked with a cross to keep the Devil away from the oven.
Of course, the word "cake" has been around for a long time, but what is meant by it has changed over the centuries. A cake can be anything that is smoodged together (technical term, there) into a kind of patty. Think of a cake of soap. The earliest examples were found among the remains of Neolithic villages where archaeologists have discovered simple cakes which were made from crushed grains, moistened, compacted and probably cooked on a hot stone. A modern survivor of this early manifestation would be oatcakes, though now we think of them more as a biscuit or cookie. As time passed the variety of goods that could be made this way grew, some were leavened while some remained more simple.
Baking was always a haphazard affair, however. The elements required had to be carefully gauged, and in ancient times it was difficult to control such items as heat and moisture. The ancient Egyptians, as with so many other things, were the first to regard baking as an art. They developed reliable cooking methods and early ovens in which they prepared a great variety of breads that served all kinds of functions within the meal. Many were sweetened with honey and eaten as desserts, but although we have plenty of evidence of the baking process from tomb paintings and we know the ingredients from those found in tomb offerings, it is difficult to know exactly what their breads tasted like. The Classical era is another matter.
The Greeks called cakes "plakous," which comes from the word for "flat," and their cakes were usually combinations of nuts and honey. Chrysippus of Tyana gives the recipe for a honey nut cake that he tasted in Crete. To us, it still has more in common with oatcakes, but is very good. Chrysippus' cakes are unusual, in that he gives us a fairly thorough recipe. In most cases it's much more difficult to determine what the dishes actually tasted like, as the accounts are vague and refer to only one or two key ingredients.
Once we enter the Roman period things become a little easier. The Latin for cake was derived from the Greek and became "placenta," but there were other words for cake too, such as "libum." Cato gives a recipe for libum in On Agriculture (75 AD), and it seems to be a small cheesecake sweetened with honey. Libum was primarily used as an offering to the gods, though there are examples of larger versions being made for general consumption. Placenta was more complex cheesecake, baked on a pastry base, or sometimes inside a pastry case. It too was sweetened with clear honey and was often presented as an offering at temples. On a more basic level was the "satura," a flat heavy cake that hearkened back to the earlier Greek recipes, featuring barley with raisins, pine nuts, pomegranate seeds and sweet wine. The Romans weren't limited to such simple fare, however, and in the later Empire they became skilled with yeast. The northern and western barbarians also leavened their bread, though in their case they used barm, which is a foaming yeast drawn from the top of beer. As time went on the terms "bread" and "cake" became interchangeable. The words themselves are of Anglo Saxon origin, and it's probable that initially the term
"cake" was used for the smaller breads. They didn't stay small for long, however, and soon came to resemble what we know call fruit breads; raised with yeast and including raisins, butter, cream, eggs, spices and honey or sugar. There are still plenty of examples of this kind of cake around, including such British staples as tea cakes, which are actually lightly sweetened fruit buns.

During the renaissance, Italian cooks became famous for their baking skills and were hired by households in both England and France. The new items that they introduced were called "biscuits," though they were the forerunner of what we now consider to be sponge cake. The earliest sponge cake recipe in English was recorded by Gervase Markham in 1615. These sponge cakes weren't exactly your Betty Crocker behemoths, though - they were most likely thin, crisp cakes, more like modern cookies. Macaroons were developed during this period, as were spiced buns such as the Easter staple, hot cross buns.
By the middle of the 18th century, yeast had fallen into disuse as a raising agent for cakes in favor of beaten eggs. The cooks of the day must have had arm muscles like Schwarzenegger - it takes an awful lot of beating by hand to do what we can accomplish in a few minutes with an electric mixer! Once as much air as possible had been beaten in, the mixture would be poured into molds, often elaborate creations, but sometimes as simple as two tin hoops, set on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. It is from these cake hoops that our modern cake pans developed.
Amazingly, it seems that the idea of cake as a dessert was particularly late in coming. Initially, they were served as a snack with sweet wine, much as madeira cake still is. Large, elaborate cakes would often be made as part of the display for banquets, but these were rarely eaten. The style of eating since the Middle Ages had required a selection of dishes to be on the table all at the same time. These would be removed and replaced with another vast array, but in the mid-nineteenth century the fashion changed and Service à la Russe became all the rage. Now the meal was served by servants, bringing diners individual dishes (similar to modern restaurant service), and while such a performance wasn't within the reach of most people, it did result in a feature that everyone could enjoy - the dessert course. Now the decorated cake that we all know and love finally put in its appearance.
There was only one thing to be dealt with - all that pesky whisking. We'd have to wait quite a while for electric beaters, but bicarbonate of soda made its first appearance in the 1840s and was soon followed by baking powder. Easier access to white flour, granulated sugar and shortening all added to the cake's popularity and such favorites as the Victoria Sandwich became familiar sights at tea time and at dinner tables. Victorian ingenuity also brought us ovens with reliable temperature control (though my mother can remember my great-grandmother gauging the temperature of the oven by sticking her hand in it), which brought complex baking within the reach of the ordinary housewife.
From the middle of the nineteenth century cake baking, along with pastry making became one of the main tests for the new housewife. Was she a cook? Could she make an airy sponge, a sinful chocolate confection…or would the family be spending a lot of time buying buns at the bakers shop?

Have a great break. Stay safe. Many thanks to those of you who have bought from us lately.

The Team at Kitchen Couture.