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| Wayne Thiebaud, Cake Window (Seven Cakes), 1970-76 |
The guests at the royal wedding ended up eating fruit
cake. Not most people's first choice, but certainly historically
significant and appropriate. Our Neolithic ancestors ground up grains,
added water, and cooked these 'oatcakes' on a hot stone. The ancient
Egyptians, followed by the Greeks, also made cakes...which basically
were fruit cakes: dense, bready creations made of dried fruits, honey,
and nuts. The Romans, who often seem to have an odd re-interpretation of
things, had two versions of cake. One was more floury and was usually
made as an offering to the gods. The other was called a 'placenta'....
seriously, I kid not. In fact, as it turns out this cheesecake-like
pastry's name is responsible for our word placenta. The wacked-out 16th
century Italian anatomist, Realdo Colombo, coined the phrase 'placenta
uterina.' He must have thought there was some similarity in form.... or
else he wanted to make sure we never ate birthday cake again. Anyway,
you can get a recipe for
the original Greek-style cake at Gourmet's website.
Even though the Brits are perhaps most associated with fruitcake, they
were -- ironically -- the ones who first diverged the path of history
away from these lead frisbees ("a geological homemade cake" said
Dickens) and towards our more familiar and enjoyable cakes with
frosting. Chaucer mentioned the serving of these cakes to the wealthy at
special occasions. Perhaps that's why people started to care about how
they tasted. And looked!
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| William and Catherine's wedding cake, 8 tiers, made by Fiona Cairns |
Cake does more than just taste good. It has powerful
evocative qualities. For Proust, it was the taste of his madeleine
dipped in tea that carried him back to moments from his childhood when
he drank tea at his aunt's:
...one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing
that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take.
I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my
mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called
"petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded inthe
fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited
after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to
my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.
No sooner had the liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a
shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
thing that was happening to me... I had now ceased to feel mediocre,
contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful
joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the
cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not,
indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How
could I seize and apprehend it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the
first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is
time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth
I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself...
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the
little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because
on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good
morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping
it first in her own cup of tea or tisane... from a long-distant past
nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken
and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring,
more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long
time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all
the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop
of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (Marcel Proust, "Overture," Swann's Way, Book One, Remembrance of Things Past, 1913)
It is not just a nostalgic sort of reminiscing in which Proust is
partaking, but the ecstatic experience of 'pure time' or
'extra-temporal' moments wherein past overlaps present... and indeed
shapes the future. For later, Proust would step on two uneven paving
stones and remark that "as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine,
all disquietude about the future, all intellectual doubt, were
dissipated." Rather than bogging him down with the weight of time and
the past, memory -- for Proust -- could free him from time altogether
and had the potential to connect him to a simultaneity that suggested
universal time and shared experience.
Time circles upon itself; moments transport and transcend; the prosaic
familiar can bring epiphanies... perhaps like the smooth circularity,
buttery transcendence, and moist mouth-watering ecstasy of cake itself.
And so to return to princesses and cake. "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!"
("Let them eat cake!") supposedly uttered Marie Antoinette during an
alleged famine in the 1770s. However, the quote is impossible to trace
back to Ms. Marie, nor were there any dire famines during Louis XVI's
reign. There were two significant bread shortages... and in fact, it was
of bread and not cake that the misattributed quote speaks. Most
historians are pretty confident that Marie never spoke the callous,
insensitive phrase... as her letters during the Flour Wars suggest great
concern for the commoners of her country. However, there are a small
few who believe it is possible... with the caveat that we don't
correctly understand what she was suggesting. Brioche now means a lovely
buttery golden bun with a similar sweetness and flakiness to a
croissant. But back in the day of Uncle Louis, brioche referred to the
water and flour paste that was leftover in the bottom of pans of
professional bakers after removing the breads and pastries. These
boulangers would scrape out this brioche and leave it for starving
beggars... a clever thrift much like the Seinfeld episode with Elaine
and her muffin tops... and bottoms. So, if Marie really said it, perhaps
she was being extremely practical... and much more compassionate that
is usually assumed.
Regardless, the phrase became tied to Marie for more symbolic reasons.
As fervor built towards the oncoming French Revolution, French
anti-monarchists forced much of their general dissatisfaction with the
tyrannical government upon Marie... and personified her to be a
frivolous, extravagant, unfeeling narcissist. She, and her cakey
comment, became symbolic of all that was wrong with France at the time.
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| Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) |
Cake often takes on symbolic resonance. For Proust. For
the French. And for Wayne Thiebaud, the artist who has so canonized the
plastic commerciality, the repetition of slices and memories, the
frosted poetry of the cake and all that it has become symbolic of --
abundance, longing, desire, nostalgia, and contemplation through the
palpable.
His paint functions literally as frosting, its thick buttery quality
becoming the thick butter of the very cake of our reality. He invites us
to re-stimulate our senses, and thereby our memories. To taste the
cake, to taste the birthday party when we were ten. Like Proust's
tea-soaked madeleine, Thiebaud's paint-viscous canvases become the
landscape of all our realities... sensory, mnemonic, and chimerical.
A pie has all kinds of marvelous complex associations. The
whiteness of meringue became for me of great poetic preoccupation: it's
like snow, like frost, like the concept of purity and, from a painter's
standpoint, white both absorbs and reflects like, it's composed of all
colors...
But the, I know you wonder -- why a pie instead of a snow bank. Well,
pie [and cake] has other implications: the idea of 'Pie in the Sky', the
old American preoccupation with Mom and Apple Pie, pie throwing
contests, pie eating contests, pie throwing in Chaplin films. One makes a
pie out of ordinary stuff, like raisins, squash or apples and gift
wraps it, in a sense, with a crust. It's very magical, very special. (Wayne Thiebaud quoted in LeGrace Benson, David Shearer, & Wayne Thiebaud, "An Interview with Wayne Thiebaud," Leonardo, vol. 2, no. 1 (Jan . 1969), 66)
Thiebaud
turned cakes into icons, painted to create microcosmic worlds of
remembrance and possibility with the allusion onto canvas of much that
exists abstractly in the corners of our minds. And he somehow presaged
our current sugar-coated engrossment with cakey sensuality.
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| Cupcake Wars on the Food Network |
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| Duff from Ace of Cakes |
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| Finished cake from Ultimate Cake Off on TLC |
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| Starry Night cake from Gateaux, Inc. of Minneapolis (on WE's Amazing Wedding Cakes) |
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| Another Gateaux, Inc. creation (www.gateaux-inc.com) |
Rather than burdening cake as being the carrier of our
celebratory obligations, let's celebrate cake itself tomorrow. Bake a
cake. Eat cake. Feed cake (gently) to a loved one. Blow out some candles
(if it so happens to be your birthday.) Indulge, imagine, reminisce,
commemorate, compete, and rebel. Savor the taste and be transported.
Fill your home with the scent of cake baking and with the aura of all it
contains... including the faint and fading pastel-tinted plaintive
wistfulness that frosts the crumb-covered plates of cake once present,
now consumed, forever sublime.
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| Thiebaud |
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