Cake : a slice of history / Alysa Levene.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levene, Alysa, 1976- author.

Contributor:

Edith E. Clark Endowment Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cake--History.

Cake.

History.

Physical Description:

303 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Pegasus Books, 2016.

Summary:

My sister had three wedding cakes. Rather than spend a lot of money on a traditional cake, she asked our grandmother, our mother, and our step-mother to make their signature dishes. My grandmother made the rich fruit cake she always baked at Christmas. My mother made a chocolate sponge. And finally, my step-mother made chocolate brownies (Nigella Lawson's recipe, if you'd like to know), whose sticky, pleasurable unctuousness is fully explained by the amount of butter they contain. In our family, as in many others, these familiar cakes are the makers of memories. But it wasn't until I developed an interest in the history of food that I started to think about the deeper significance of these tasty treats. What does cake mean for different people? How have we come to have such a huge variety of cakes? What had to happen historically for them to appear? And what can they tell us about the family and women's roles in particular? I wrote this book to find out the answers... Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : What is a cake?

2000 BC (Before Cake)

The secret meaning of fruit cake

Butter, sugar, and slavery (or Queen Victoria's sandwich)

Domestic goddesses

The cardboard wedding cake

The cake that travelled the world

A cake just for you

The original showstoppers

The feminist cupcake

Epilogue : A slice of history.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-291) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Edith E. Clark Endowment Fund.

ISBN:

9781605989273

1605989274

OCLC:

907103583

Publisher Number:

99967003576