What the Dickens is a Twelfth-Cake?

As I mentioned earlier this month, I've signed up to be part of a blog hop called A Dickens of a Christmas. You'll see by the Linky links below that it's about everything you need to know to "keep Christmas" in the style of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Whilst many of my co-bloggers are focusing on the elements of the Cratchit family dinner, I thought I'd take a look at the fascinating pile of festive edibles upon which the Ghost of Christmas Present sits enthroned when he materializes in Scrooge's rooms (see the illustration above).

Dickens list the components: "crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy ... turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch." Most of these items might turn up on a contemporary dinner menu ("brawn" is roast boar)... except twelfth-cakes. Rashly, I decided to write about them. But it turns out that it's such a huge topic that I'm going to need to write more than one post. So, to begin: what exactly is a twelfth-cake?

Most simply put, a twelfth-cake, or twelfth-night cake, is a fruitcake, and it has a history going back many centuries, at least into the medieval period, when dried fruits and nuts were luxurious treats for important celebrations. It's designed to be served on Twelfth Night, or the night of the twelfth day of Christmas (January 5) and the eve of Epiphany, the date upon which the Three Kings were supposed to have arrived at cradle of the baby Jesus.

So far so good. But to really understand what a twelfth-cake is, you must understand that many of the holiday festivals still celebrated in the modern world, including Hallowe'en, Christmas and pre-Lenten carnivals such as Mardi Gras, were once seen as part of a whole season of holidays designed to get people in northern countries through the dark, cold, lean days from the end of one harvest to the beginning of the next year's planting season.

How old are these traditions? I'd guess that they're as old as the earliest agricultural societies, and certainly older than Christianity, although by the Middle Ages in Europe, they had bonded inextricably into the church calendar.

Above: A Regency Twelfth Night party for the upper middle class, with cake, by Isaac Cruikshank. The partygoers represent satirical types. Visit the blog austenonly for more about this image and Twelfth Night in Jane Austen's day.

Here's the gist: imagine a festival season that extends right from the end of harvest at Hallowe'en (October 31) to Twelfth Night (January 5). Then there's a bleak indeterminate period until the beginning of the Easter season, which starts with the Carnival (Mardi Gras) before Ash Wednesday that may fall anywhere between February 4 and March 10. A six-week fast follows (which makes sense, because it would help stretch out the stores of preserved food) until Easter, the beginning of the spring growing season.

In the Middle Ages, the pre-Christmas festival was governed by the Lord of Misrule, and was a time when a peasant could be a king, a prince could be a beggar, a man could be a woman, and so on. Our Hallowe'en disguises are partly a holdover from that; and so may be the custom of dressing up for Purim.


Victorian Twelfth Night masquerade party for farm folk in the illustration "Twelfth Night Merry-making in Farmer Shakeshaft's Barn" by "Phiz", aka Hablot Knight Browne, from the book Mervyn Clithroe by William Harrison Ainsworth (1898).

Costumes became part of Twelfth Night, and it became the custom for guests at a Twelfth Night party to impersonate satirical characters like the figures from the Commedia dell'Arte. Shakespeare knew all about this, and the low comedy figures in his play Twelfth Night (Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch and Feste the clown) are the same types of comic figures. The festivities migrated to the Americas in colonial days, but have pretty much died out in North America (except in New Orleans, about which more later).


19th-century Twelfth Night party cards showing satirical characters. Visit Puzzle Museum for more illustrations of these cards.

In England, by the time of Jane Austen (the early 1800s), party guests would choose a picture card that told them what character they would play for the evening. When the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on his tour, one of their stops is a children's Twelfth Night party, but in the 1870s Queen Victoria outlawed adults' masquerades because, like so many similar carnivalesque celebrations (such as mumming), they threatened to get out of hand and facilitate civil unrest.

But back to the twelfth-cake... It is known in France, where it is an un-iced almond cake called a Galette des Rois, and a King Cake (right) is still served up in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, where it is generally embellished with garish purple, green and gold sugar in honour of the Three Kings. In Spain, it's a "King's Ring" – Roscón de reyes in Spanish and Tortell de Reis in Catalan (pictured below) – a ring-shaped cake studded with candied fruit. The cake Dickens would have known, however, was a fruitcake in the sense of our Christmas cake, often covered in fondant, and ornately decorated. (I believe the ghost in the picture at the top has one foot on a Christmas pudding and the other on a twelfth-cake.)

In 18th- and 19th-century England, the cakes were a chance for confectioners to show off their art, much like a modern wedding cake (and in fact the two sometimes doubled up, since many weddings were celebrated over the Christmas season). They were expensive and ornate, and, as William Hones' The Every Day Book (1825, 1827) tells us, they were decorated with "stars, castles, kings, cottages, dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats, dogs, churches, lions, milk-maids, knights, serpents, and innumerable other forms in snow-white confectionary, painted with variegated colours".

Whatever its other ornaments, the cake was usually topped with a crown, and from early times, the cake would be baked with a bean inside (later, a bean and a pea). Whoever got the slice with the bean was the king of the festivities, and if there was a pea, the lady who received it became the queen.

To me, this feels like a remnant of the very, very ancient practice of (in fact or symbolically), choosing a sacrificial victim to be killed and buried in the soil or eaten at the end of the harvest season to perpetuate the fertility of the fields. Many mythologies have dying and reborn god myths – part of the same idea. In a way, the cake with the crown stands in for the king of the past harvest year; it is devoured by the community, and whoever receives the bean stands for the king of the new harvest, whose seeds will, we hope, rise up in the spring.

So you see why I couldn't fit this all into just one post. Wish me luck as I explore actual recipes for twelfth-cakes and report back to you later.

And to finish, a poem of 1648 by Robert Herrick, entitled "Hesperides, Twelfe Night, or King and Queene":

Now, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where Beane's the King of the sport here;
Besides we must know,
The Pea also
Must revell, as Queene, in the Court here.
Begin then to chuse
This night as ye use
Who shall for the present delight here,
Be a King by the lot,
And who shall not
Be Twelfe-day Queene for the night here.
Which knowne, let us make
Joy-sops with the cake,
And let not a man be seen here,
Who unurg'd will not drinke
To the base from the brink
A health to the King and Queene here.
Next crowne the bowle full
With gentle lamb's woll*;
Add sugar, nutmeg and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And this ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.

*Lambswool: Wassail, an alcoholic punch, named for its frothiness.

Sources and further reading (with thanks to Bridget Wranich, program officer at Historic Fort York and co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Ontario)

• BBC.com: "Ten Ages of Christmas" by Christine Lalumia
• Cooking in Europe, 1650—1850 by Ivan Day (Greenwood Press, 2009).
• Feasting and Fasting: Canada's Heritage Celebrations by Dorothy Duncan (Dundurn Press, 2010).
• Historic Food (by Ivan Day): "Twelfth Cake"
• Historical Foods: "12th Night King and Queen Cake"
• The Jane Austen Centre: "Twelfth Night Cake"
• Entries on "Twelfth Night cake" and "Galette" in The Penguin Companion to Food by Alan Davidson (Penguin Books, 1999).
• Sugar-Plums and Sherbet: The Prehistory of Sweets by Laura Mason (Prospect Books, 2004).

Other image credits: Ghost of Christmas Present: a John Leech illustration from the original edition of A Christmas Carol. Tortell de Reis from Wikipedia. Mardi Gras King Cake from Andrea's Recipes, where you will find a recipe for a New Orleans-style Mardi Gras King Cake.