Season's eatings: A history of Christmas cake

KIM KNIGHT - stuff.co.nz - 18/12/201

The hallway of my grandmother's Blenheim home was long, dark and scary.

Five solid wooden doors, including the linen cupboard. A piano. Dusty shelves containing a shell collection, dead seahorses, and, terrifyingly, a jar of pickled baby octopus. But close your eyes and take comfort: that hallway always smelled like cake.
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother's house has been an inhalation of Christmas. Almond essence. Lemon peel. Sticky dates and shrivelled currants. I phoned her a fortnight ago to ask how many cakes she had made in her lifetime.
That Monday, she said, there were 150 of them sitting on every available surface – the fruits of the Marlborough Cake Decorator Guild's fundraising labour. "But I can't count those. I have help with those ones."
Mary Parker, 83, has always been a cake decorator. But it turns out she became a cake baker only when my dad's mum shared her family recipe. "Before then, all my cakes were either burned or raw."
The rich fruit cakes my grandmother makes now – up to 350 over the past three decades, she estimates – are a direct descendant of my parents' nuptial cake. The child bride and groom who grew up to produce two children: my sister, a baker. And me, a burner. Too lazy to measure properly and set the timer.

This Christmas would be different. And for that I blame the authors of The Twelve Cakes of Christmas: An evolutionary history with recipes. It is an extraordinary, inspiring book born of a decade's research, the statistical analysis of more than 800 local recipes. "We like to imagine our more distant ancestors baked Christmas cakes," the authors write. "In short, that this is one of the most conservative items in our culinary tradition. But when we went in search of a recipe entitled `Christmas cake' that our great-great grandmother might have made before she emigrated to New Zealand in 1850, we could not find one. At least not under that name."

Helen Leach, emeritus professor, anthropology, at Otago University, and Raewyn Inglis, food historian, did the research. Mary Browne, food writer, tested the recipes – starting with the toughest, an adaptation of the 1669 instructions "To make an excellent cake" from The Closet of the Emminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie K.
"It got easier and easier the nearer to today I got," Browne said from her Dunedin home.

"Anything after Alison Holst and Tui Flower – the recipes from then were well written. They didn't need to be well written earlier, because women knew how to bake. They learned at home."
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