If there is any food-related tradition I would bring back from the dead, it would be the Halloween Cake.

The candy companies would prefer you remain ignorant of this history, but All Hallows’ Eve actually has a long history of thematic baked goods and cakes and only recently relied on the treats we know today. With its mixed-faith origins, historical Halloween practices incorporated various bakes including Soul Cakes to commemorate the dead and Dumb Cakes for finding husbands. But neither of these are the cake on which my spooky season aspirations fixate. I am haunted and desperately want to revive the fortune-telling baked good simply known as the Halloween Cake.

Throughout its long-lived history, Halloween has been celebrated with a veritable cornucopia of fortune-telling foodstuffs. Published in 1921, the book Hallowe’en Happenings by Lettie C. VanDerveer includes a lengthy section on magical games and tests including options such as the “Apple Test,” “Flour Test,” “Pumpkin seeds,” “Nuts All,” “Ducking for Apples,” “Lucky Peanuts,” and—my favorite—”Cruller-eating Race.” There were numerous food themed ways to tell one’s fortune, too, using ingredients such as egg whites, apple peels, popcorn, teacups, nuts, pies, peanuts, and—also my favorite—cake.

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Many of these traditions can be traced back to various early American, British, and European origins, some as far back as the 18th century, and most are rooted in folklore practices revolving around the harvesttime. Overwhelmingly, the intent of these edible divinations was to learn about your future husband (or if you were fated to become a spinster). Throw an apple peel over your shoulder and let it fall to the ground revealing the initial of your betrothed. Drip an egg white into hot water to see the face of your future beloved.

Many early Halloween Cakes also centered fortunes around the normative social options for women and girls of the era. These cakes were baked with little metal charms wrapped in grease-proof paper (parchment or baking paper today), which eager revelers would discover as they ate their slice. The charms were few and their meanings varied, but generally: a ring symbolized marriage, a thimble for spinsterhood, and a button meant that a sweetheart was near. Occasionally there was a key or a penny that purported long life and/or wealth, but the real prize was always the ring. In some versions of this ritual, girls were meant to place pieces of this cake under their pillow in order for their fortune to come true. I wonder how many of them just dreamed of the perfect piece of cake instead of a husband…

For a time, Halloween Cakes embraced the drama they were always destined to hold. Gone were the buttons and thimbles. These cakes now carried multiple rings (everyone gets hitched!), diamonds, breastpins, watches.

The cake itself varied in composition. One early 20th century recipe calls for a spiced and fruit studded quick-bread-style cake made with soured milk and topped with marshmallow maple frosting. Others resembled early fruit cakes or Great Cakes. One called for the addition of chopped nuts (dealer’s choice), but was otherwise quite plain. A local bakery advertised their Halloween Cakes as traditional “iced and ornamented” gingerbread. Essentially, any kind of cake would do, it just needed the right vibes.

The drama was carried through to the performative display and serving of the cake. Instructions for cutting Halloween Cakes included the somehow unspoken, but well known rule that “the best looking person” should cut the cake. Additionally, everyone at the party must stop whatever they were doing and pay attention or the cake should be moved into the center of the room for easier viewing. Lastly, echoing historical ritual rules like those observed with Dumb Cakes, the Halloween Cake must be cut in complete silence as the clock strikes a specific time (which varied depending upon the publication dispensing the rule set). This is the exact kind of drama missing from modern Halloween parties.

One Halloween Cake description listed in an October 1899 issue of the Courier Post calls for an elaborate scheme of hiding bespoke little gifts under pre-sliced squares of cake. Instructions continue with:

“The hostess has taken some one of the guests—probably a boy—into her confidence and, as the gifts are discovered, he tells a fortune by each one.”

Examples include:

• “A candy heart! The owner will have a serious love affair during the year.”

• “A toy drum. Johnny is fated to become a musician before the year is out.”

• “A candy cigar. I am sorry to notice, Willy, that you are addicted to the weed.”

• “And so on.”

I yearn for this drama.

Later versions of the 20th century Halloween Cake included far more fortunes. This American-made Fortune Telling Cake set boasted 15 different pieces including an owl that denoted that the fortune seeker was smart, a boat that foretold travel, and a frying pan that warned the holder: “don’t envy others who are good looking, you’ll be more popular with your cooking.” This cake doled out scary, but perhaps very relatable truths on Halloween.

This little mid-century set included some of the same old charms, with a few wild additions such as a motorcycle that suggested the finder would have to “get used to lots of noise” because they’ll have a large family of children, a birdcage with a cryptic message about listening to the caged creature inside when sadness struck, and, inexplicably, a banjo with the following fortune: “Don’t bother with love for pity’s sake, an excellent musician you’re sure to make.” I’m obsessed.

And if a real cake filled with inedible, tooth-shattering baubles wasn’t dramatic enough, some Halloween Cakes were simply made to look like cake. Fake cakes, made of neatly folded paper or upcycled from round hat boxes, were decorated to look like cakes, and were sometimes adorned with real edible frosting. The boxes would hold little cakes, favors, and fortunes for guests to take home after the party. These descriptions made me realize one of the things I loved about Halloween parties as a child were the little plastic rings that sat atop store-bought cupcakes. The cake was never anything of note, but the thematic ring was the real prize, all you had to do was lick the frosting off the band and hope you didn’t slash your tongue on the sharp plastic edges. The presentation, the experience, the drama!

When you hear “the age of Aquarius,” you likely think of that catchy 1969 cover of the famous opening song from the musical Hair that ends with the uplifting line from “Let the Sunshine In,” right? Well, any astrologer worth their celestial seasonings will tell you that this hippy song, while delightful, actually misinterprets the cataclysmic chaos that the dawning of the Aquarian era foretells.

Nevertheless, the 1960s and 1970s became culturally synonymous with the vibes of the song, and led to wide-spread astrological capitalism, touching everything from the Ice Capades to Zippo lighters. In 1969, Woodstock was billed as “an Aquarian Exposition,” and if you know anything about the muddy chaos that was Woodstock and the manipulative voyeurism history of expositions in America then you might think it an apt description. Regardless, the astrological reference was used to imply radical change and love, rather than what Carl Jung believed to be the apocalyptic era leading up to coming of the anti-Christ.

And because humans like to celebrate all things good and even some things bad, there were, of course, astrology cakes.

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If you’ve been paying attention to recent cake aesthetic trends online, you’re probably already familiar with the 1972 Cake Decorating Yearbook by Wilton, which featured a large spread of zodiac themed cakes in bright, counterculture hues (also note the oval cake pan shapes!). Contemporary bakers and cake lovers ate up these designs and they even inspired the viral artist-baker aptly named Gemini Bake to recreate the horoscope series in her own style.

Wilton published various cake decorating periodicals in the 1960s and later switched to the well-loved bi-monthly magazine style with Wilton’s Yearbook in early 1970s. These magazines featured all sorts of cake designs for weddings, retirements, the changing seasons, bake sales, bat mitzvahs, and more. They also included a section at the back for reader commentary, magazine contests, and—building on public interest in astrology—a cake themed horoscope. Dubbed “Decorator’s Horoscope,” the readings centered around cake decorating (obvs) and personalized details about being a good hostess or party planner. The magazine also used this as an opportunity to plug their Wilton themed cake decorating classes. Cancers should “plan to attend classes in other cities (you love to travel).”

But, Wilton wasn’t the first company or publication to use cake astrology. In 1969, the frozen baked good brand Sara Lee published a Zodiac Cake Serving Idea Booklet with suggestions for each sign. A recipe for Creme de Chocolate Cake, which called for a “Sara Lee completely baked, fresh frozen chocolate cake,” was made to “match the duality of the Gemini personality” and boasted a “non-routine frosting” just like Geminis prefer (I presume).

The company advertised the little booklet in newspaper food sections across the nation, teasing readers with a recipe or two at a time. “Nothing is lost by dropping birthdays for Zodiac parties, (except age, and who needs that, anyway?) For the Aries personality, there is the convenient Chocolate Impulse Cake, made with a fresh frozen, completely baked German chocolate cake” (The Shreveport Journal, March 27, 1969). The free booklet made ample use of Sara Lee products, which was a common marketing tactic of the era.

Betty Crocker got in on the astrological action, too, with a simple Age of Aquarius cake complete with a candy corn sun in their 1971 Recipe Card Library.

Newspapers ran their own astrological themed ideas, too, or answered reader requests for zodiac cake recipes. Readers were eager for ways to identify themselves via their zodiac, their birthstone, or their bespoke cake flavor. This 1970s recipe for a Zodiac Birthday Cake boasted “an intriguing and rich spicy flavor and an extra-moist texture” (thanks to the inclusion of tomato soup!). The cake also exuded a kind of conspicuous otherworldliness via the flavor combination and the use of “whole imported dates.”

In her “Looking at Cooking” column in The Houston Chronicle, food editor Ann Criswell created her own cake horoscopes with Double Lemon Pound Cake for Cancers (“all the Cancerians we know love lemon”), German Chocolate Pound Cake for Libras, Fresh Strawberry Cake for Scorpios (because they like “nicely arranged food and things that are pleasing to the eye”), Sagittarians evidently “love the outdoors and picnic food” so they get Applesauce Cake, and because Aries are “bursting with all the exuberance of spring” they‘ll love a Carrot Cake (The Houston Chronicle, Food Section, page 3, April 23, 1970). Virgos were suspiciously absent from her astrological roster.

Once the zodiac cake frenzy was firmly cemented in the zeitgeist, grocery stores and local bakeries jumped on the trend. For example, Safeway offered a selection of pre-designed zodiac birthday cakes.

As the age of Aquarius (at least the counterculture version that lasted through the 70s) waned, the public interest in horoscopes remained. Anne Byrn, aka The Cake Doctor, included a batch of cupcake themed readings in her book Cupcakes: From the Cake Mix Doctor published in 2005. According the Byrn, “opinionated Aquarius” likes “worldly flavors,” “down-to-earth Taurus” gets “earth-toned goodies,” and Scorpios are “drawn to dark, rich flavors.”

The connection between zodiac and cakes was further bolstered by notable figures who baked or selected astrological cakes for special events. Although fictional, the magical Mary Poppins had a “Zodiac Cake” in the book Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookery Book with a Story. Written as a follow-up book to the original opus by series author P.L. Travers, Poppins steps in for the Banks’ family cook and teaches the children cooking and baking. The book makes no mention of astrology or the zodiac and is filled with plenty of other cake recipes including one for “Twelfth Night” and a “Very Plain Cake.” Published in 1975, perhaps Poppins was simply jumping at an opportunity to connect with a new generation of children—or moonchildren—from the Age of Aquarius.

I am off to celebrate my own Virgo self with a birthday cake of my own making, because who could really live up to my own expectations but me?

Not a week goes by now it seems without some sort of online cake drama. While I’ve been attempting to avoid social media this summer, I couldn’t ignore the recent drama served up by the op-ed piece “Enough With the Ugly Cakes” in The Cut. A handful of folks familiar with my cake expertise made sure I saw the piece and I’m grateful that they did.

I know cakes. My grandmother was a professional home wedding cake baker and taught me most of what I know about baking and about the baking business. My graduate work turned into a close study of cakes and their cultural implications. I’ve written a lot about cakes and I’m currently working on a book about the cultural feminist history of cake, having studied cakes, bakers, and baking related socioeconomics and legal issues related to cottage baking in the United States. In my professional and academic opinion, the author of that article does not know cakes.

I won’t cover the baking logistics or the author’s misunderstanding (or at the very least lack of acknowledgement) of the costs of running a contemporary custom bakery. You can read wonderful breakdowns and discussions about those mishaps written by bakers including Comrade Biscuit and Pastry Parade (I’m sure there are other great takes, please share them in the comments below). I also loved yesterday’s response from my friends over at Cake Zine (a publication that really understands and does great research on cake!). Instead, I’m going to focus on the sociocultural and historical inaccuracies of the “Ugly Cake” article.

Cake shaming is not only weird, but such a strange use of energy. Yet it’s exactly the kind of thing our society tends to do to anything related to pleasure, especially when it’s created for or by a woman. (I’ll spend another post waxing about the sensual pleasure connection between the revival of vintage-inspired cakes and the rise of the historical/historically-inspired female POV Romantasy genre.) Bottom line: We do not yuck other peoples’ yums. The fact that the author has reduced the glorious diversity of cake aesthetics into two categories of “Ugly Cakes”—“vintage monstrosities” or “floral slop”—is lazy data collection and simply unkind.

Although the author was writing an opinion piece and entitled to their preferences, there’s a lot of power in the written word. Notably, this same author has also written multiple articles filed under the “POWER” column at The Cut covering important topics including bans on trans athletes, the syringe attacks in France, and pieces on domestic violence against women. The use of disparaging language like “shapeless mounds” alongside direct links to bakers’ websites and Instagram feeds are potentially libelous and definitely cruel, especially when those links take you to sites, such as the brilliant Yip.Studio, that are full of examples of technically-difficult cake shapes that are not only logistically arduous to cut, frost, and decorate, but decidedly boundary-breaking in design. Further, the use of “inedible flora” on cakes isn’t a new Instagram trend, but a practice bakers (and consumers) have been navigating for decades. Bakers like Frosted Hag, whose cake aesthetic utilizes copious florals and is precisely the reason people seek out her work, include notes about the non-edible (but “safe to be in contact with the cake”) flowers she uses.

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The Rise of Cake Culture

As commenter “shopgirl1111” so eloquently pointed out in the comments of the article, “can we really credit the pandemic & out of work bakers with the spread of “whimsical, outlandish” cakes? I feel like they’ve been steady on the social media scene since the Ace of Cakes & Cake Boss…” “Shopgirl1111” is spot on, as our cultural obsession with ornate cakes has been brewing long before the pandemic and many in the Baking Community have been working to revive vintage styles and techniques for years. Based on the article, it seems the author only started paying attention to cakes during the pandemic, when they “had lots of time on [their] hands and very little to celebrate and Instagram was one of our last lifelines to human connection.”

The truly problematic issue isn’t the timeline or who came first, rather that women are the ones baking this time. Ace of Cakes and Cake Boss are both men with their own brick-and-mortar bakeries. The bakers criticized by the author largely identify as women. Additionally, many operate out of their homes under far more precarious cottage baking operational structures.

Here We Go Again, Devaluing Baking Labor

The pandemic did result in numerous out-of-work bakers and industry folks who pivoted to baking out of their homes in lieu of other unavailable restaurant work. Shortly after this societal shift, there was a massive and long overdue revamp of the cottage baking industry—meaning food made in a home kitchen for sale—and related laws which vary from state to state. Historically, cottage baking laws have disproportionately impacted women who are more likely to be working out of their homes while also dealing with domestic labor as well as childcare. These laws, while theoretically important for maintaining safe and clean working conditions for products that will eventually be sold to consumers, also create unnecessary regulatory burdens and have historically crafted a stereotype of cottage bakers as unsafe and unskilled. The concept of unskilled labor is a classist, and often sexist, trope.

The author argued: “I’m not saying these cakes don’t require skill, artistry, and impressive amounts of labor to create. But beneath all the branches and glitter, they’re often just not that good. (It makes sense: They’re made to be seen or even stabbed on SNL; taste is low on the priority list).”

It doesn’t matter what they do with the cakes. As baker The Sweet Feminist has explained repeatedly on her Instagram, the cakes can be dessert, a medium for messaging, or none of your business unless you ordered it. At the end of the day, the cake required highly skilled labor.

Boxed Cake Redemption

Another issue the author had with the cakes was the flavor, exclaiming that “everything tastes suspiciously like boxed vanilla.”

Presumably, the author is referring to the taste of boxed cake mix. Boxed cake mix flavors may not be for everyone, but they are plenty of peoples’ preference as evidenced by decades of boxed cake mixes lining grocery store shelves and other bakers’ dedicated attempts to reproduce those flavors from scratch in their own kitchens. Boxed cake mix has a long history of being disparaged as a cheat, a shortcut, a “less-than” option used by “unskilled” bakers. In reality, bakers, professional and otherwise, often utilize cake mixes in some form. They also acknowledge that boxed cake mix flavor profiles have a perfectly acceptable place in our cultural foodways. Ultimately, hating on boxed cake mix and those who use them is classist.

Later, the author says: “Give me a big honking square of grocery-store sheet cake from a Stop & Shop fridge.” That is boxed cake mix. Most grocery store cakes are made from boxed cake mixes, and thus have the “boxed vanilla” flavor plenty of people prefer and that’s just fine. We all like what we like.

Enough with Lambeth

When describing the cakes, the author explains that “They’re covered all over with thick, Lambeth piping, a 1930s decorating style characterized by intentional excess to create layers and dimension.”

Lambeth is a method, not a style. Joseph A. Lambeth was a man who got good at teaching other people how to do overpiping. He published his book, The Lambeth Method of Cake Decoration and Practical Pastries in 1934, but the techniques he covered had existed for generations before he came on the cake scene. Other methods include the still-popular Wilton method, the Ateco method, and the methods championed by the UK’s Anne Anson who worked with the brand Tala in the 1950s. They’re all teaching methods for overpiping, which is a very delicate, highly skilled technique that demonstrates frosting can be used to create depth and intricacy—not just excess.

These cakes aren’t all Lambeth, and they aren’t all vintage! They are a culmination of decades, centuries, generations of baking methods and skills and aesthetics distilled into numerous reimaginings of our current cake preferences.

And One Last Thing

The author sets up a real apples to oranges situation with her final argument: “Whatever happened to the unassuming torte, the trusty cheesecake, the good old bundt?”

A layer cake isn’t tiramisu and tortes are incredibly assuming (see: Dobos torte above) and deservedly so. Those delicious little cakes typically call for a special springform pan and require multiple pastry techniques in a single recipe (sponge, caramel, mousse, buttercream) and are just as complex as one of the cakes disparaged by the author. Comparing complex American cakes with equally complex European tortes is asking for a complicated geocultural bakeoff along with an in-depth discussion of the evolution of baking traditions and global trade history (which we’ll have to save for another newsletter).

In my opinion, it really sounds like the author just doesn’t like cake, and that’s just fine. Want to know a secret? I also sometimes (often) don’t like cake and would rather have a cookie or a slice of pie (don’t tell my grandma). But I respect the work put into a cake—be it from the grocery store baking counter or from your neighbor hustling in their little apartment kitchen. No one needs cake, its very existence denotes its specialness. A cake baked was made with intention, skilled labor, and because someone somewhere had an idea of what would bring them joy and someone else found a way to bake it into reality. That could never be considered ugly.

In the Bible, there are countless mentions of lambs both literal and metaphorical, a couple instances each of rabbits and eggs, and precisely zero references to coconuts. Nevertheless, Easter isn’t complete with a bag or two of that sweet, dusty, shredded coconut.

The coconut has historically been a domesticated food staple for many cultures around the globe, including Southeast Asian communities as well as diverse populations of Pacific Islanders. Shredded, or desiccated for my non-American readers, coconut was invented by several white men in the 1800s. I say “several” because several men claimed the title. There was Connecticut-based inventor E. Chapman Maltby who had been cleaning coconut shells for another project and then decided to shred the coconut meat for kicks. In 1876, Maltby and his partner Edward Smith debuted a coconut shredding machine at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. A few years later, a New York man named Leopold Schepp entered the shredded coconut game and earned the name the Coconut King of New York (so inventive!). And then there was the already aptly named Franklin Baker, the founder of of the retail brand Baker’s that is still known to this day for it’s baking chocolate, cocoa powder, and, of course, shredded coconut.

Baker realized the potential of direct-to-consumer recipes and published a little booklet in 1922, which included an introduction to coconut as a “wholesome body-building food” arguing that “pound for pound it is far more nourishing than beef and other standard foods. According to government reports, one pound of dried coconut equals two and one-half pounds of beef.” (I wonder if the raw milk and beef tallow folks know about this?) The booklet also described the two different Baker coconut products: the blue can with “fresh, ripe coconut, canned in its own milk,” and the yellow can “fresh, naturally moist coconut without the milk, sweetened with pure cane sugar.” This shredded, sweetened option was incredibly popular in the Southern United States and the phrase “Southern Style” was soon added to the marketing materials for yellow cans of Bakers coconut.

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The South’s love of coconut cake, albeit not in springtime animal form, is largely credited to the work of Black Southern bakers. Often considered to be one of the first published coconut cake recipes, Malinda Russell includes a recipe for Cocoanut Sponge Cake (which calls for an entire coconut) in her 1866 text A Domestic Cookbook. A recipe for Mountain Cake—featuring a fluffy coconut exterior—is listed in Minnie Fox’s 1904 cookbook The Bluegrass Cookbook. White women included recipes for coconut cake in their cookbooks, too, likely inspired by cakes they had learned about from Black bakers. Marion Tyree includes multiple coconut cake recipes in her 1878 text Housekeeping in old Virginia. Eventually, much like other dishes and techniques born of enslaved and free Black culinary ingenuity, the coconut cake evolved into a generalized southern tradition.

How we got from southern staple to Easter centerpiece, I’m still not sure. Shredded coconut is a decorating medium that contains multitudes, which is why it has been used to denote everything from fluffy white snow to foaming waves on a tropical beach (which I now realize are both just different physical states of water, but you get my point). By the early 20th century, coconut was no longer novel and not particularly expensive, not necessarily a splurge for a fancy Easter Sunday supper. It certainly didn’t allude to any foods or symbols mentioned in Bible stories or even the pagan traditions on which Easter is based. Now surveying the southern Easter table, I’m also side-eyeing the traditional glazed ham. Why are you HERE, ham?! To which fable do you allude?!

Nevertheless, coconut dominated the midcentury Easter scene, covering everything: traditional layer cakes topped with jelly beans, traditional two-piece cake pan molded lamb cakes, daisies, and whatever this monstrosity is hatching out of the coconut-covered egg blow.

In 1958, Baker’s issued another branded baking booklet featuring all sorts of Cut-Up Cakes decorated with shredded coconut and other Baker’s products. One recipe was the Cut-Up Bunny Cake, a flat-lay cake made with two round layers cut into shapes to make a head and ears. The Women’s Pages went rabid for this cake and papers across the nation reproduced this story like, well, rabbits. According to several newspaper stories in the early 1990s, these little branded baking pamphlets were so popular that “over 3.5 million copies of the recipes were distributed across the United States” through mail-in and grocery store promotions.

Baker’s did not, in fact, invent putting shredded coconut on cakes, they merely took advantage of a decorating trend that consumers were already doing. The 1952 Easter issue of the Chicago Sunday Tribune featured recipes for both lamb and bunny cakes made with traditional two-part cake molds. The recipe instructed readers to frost their bunnies with a seven-minute frosting and sprinkle with “shredded moist coconut.” The 1957 Easter issue of the Women’s Pages in Baltimore’s The Evening Sun provided multiple images (a generous give in those newspaper days) for constructing a Modern Bunny Cake without a dedicated mold. This “bunny sculpture” cake called for a loaf pan (much like Bayou Saint Cake’s modern loaf pan lamb cake!), with additional instructions for how to cut the cake just-so to make a body, legs, face, and tall ears. The resulting cake is covered in a marshmallow frosting and shredded coconut.

I asked my grandmother, who has made a Cut-Up Bunny Cake for Easter from time immemorial, why she bakes this cake and why she thought coconut has this association with Easter. Here is her response via text message:

Because they're so cute and of course the bunny is associated with Easter. I forgot to tell you that I tinted a little of coconut light pink for inside or middle of ears. Looks cute. Actually, you could toast coconut and make him brownish all over. I guess coconut at Easter is spring like and refreshing. Luv u.

So there you have it, we use coconut because it’s springlike, refreshing, and cute. Here are some of my favorite examples of just how cute (read: increasingly unhinged) coconut can be.

Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

BONUS CAKE: Devil’s Food Lamb Cake made with chocolate flavored shredded coconut

In the sequel to the Easter-timed horror film, this is the other baddie the original villain has to fight after which we realize ala Godzilla vs. Mothra that Coconut Egg Demon was really a friend to humans after all.

Ahh Thanksgiving. That awkward holiday that feels uniquely American (shut it, Canada), but is also historically complicated, leading to tricky conversations with the small children who have off school for several days (if not the whole week) while their parents juggle work (very American) and pending grocery store closures. And that doesn’t even account for the big meal, or all the planning and prep labor that is almost always performed by women, much of which the children won’t even eat. If only there were a special food or dish that we made during just this time of year to compensate for all the trouble this holiday causes. Turkey is a Christmas item, too. All the sides are similar staples of other holiday tables. Cranberries don’t even really get a reprieve until after the winter. Maybe, there’s a baked good? Mayhap a special cake?

Yes! The traditional, eponymous, every-American-definitely-knows-about-this Thanksgiving Cake!

You haven’t heard about Thanksgiving Cake? Well, let me enlighten you with a short-but-sweet (remember those pesky childcareless kids at home this week?) bit of food history while you finish your half workday.

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An early mention of Thanksgiving Cake appears in the National Cookery Book, touted as “the first all-American cookbook” or “America’s first ‘national’ cookbook,” despite many others existing prior. This cookbook was compiled for America’s Centennial celebration in 1876 in Philadelphia by the Women’s Executive Committee, not long after Thanksgiving became an federally recognized holiday in 1863. Purportedly chaired by Benjamin Franklin’s great granddaughter, Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, this committee sent invitations to women across the nation to submit recipes for the book. The resulting compilation reported to include “purely American recipes” and excluded “the receipts common to all nations” (sure, Jan). One recipe was for Thanksgiving Cake, which described a yeasted, enriched cake, studded with dried fruits such as currants and citron and flavored with spices including nutmeg and cinnamon.

Wait. That sounds a lot like another cake I’ve seen before. Let’s look at another recipe. This one here is from the The Unrivalled Cook-Book and Housekeeper’s Guide published in 1886.

This is weird. This cake sounds an awful lot like other historical cakes I’ve seen before, ones that simply take an old cake-baking method and flavor profile and slap a new nostalgia-inducing name on it. Let’s look at one more from The Inglenook Cook Book, published nearly two decades later in 1901.

Okay, there’s some new dried fruits and coffee for a flavor update. Does that say it will keep for 3 MONTHS? Seriously this sounds just like another cake I know of…

*comically spits out cranberries* BUT MRS. BEETON WAS BRITISH! Why is she talking about Thanksgiving Cake and publishing our very American recipe?! Well, as I’m sure you haven’t possibly deduced by this point, I’m afraid to inform you that Thanksgiving Cake isn’t that special after all, because it is merely ELECTION CAKE using a different name! BUT WAIT, Election Cake is really just a traditional early English-style fruit cake or “plumb cake.” We’ve come full circle! What could this possibly mean for our cherished cultural and historical American food traditions?

Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, except that cake names perhaps carry more cultural significance than the recipes themselves. It might also mean that early American women made a ton of fruit cake for election season because their husbands said “all the boys” when asked about a headcount and she’s a waste-not-want-not girlie and stretched that shelf-stable cake until the next holiday. Most likely, it’s a symptom of our collective national obsession with nostalgia and mythmaking that makes us look back on the foodways of the past (even if only the recent past) and saddling dishes we find significant with hefty names like “Election Cake” and “Thanksgiving Cake.” Like the “great times” that evidently stick “in the memory of many a boy grown to manhood” as they romanticize their mother prepping for Thanksgiving weeks before the actual holiday meal (ugh, girl, I feel you).

Published recipes for Thanksgiving Cakes begin to wane around the 1920s, perhaps due to yet another opportunistic shift to turn Christmas into the de facto fruit cake holiday. A decade later, Fro-Joy, a brand of the General Ice Cream Corporation (and later part of Kraft) filled the Thanksgiving Cake void with their own interpretation of the traditional “plumb cake” with plum pudding vanilla ice cream cakes topped with frozen ice cream turkeys. *reevaluates Thanksgiving menu, considers scrapping all for an in-depth ice cream cake making adventure.*

And if I had any power in my role as the Internet’s snarky cake scholar, I would kindly like to request that we bring back this ice cream cake tradition (honestly far more American) and leave the fruit cakes to panicked election day baking and Christmastime gift giving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pairs well with:

To learn more about all the foods we associate with Thanksgiving, check out this great Q&A with BU Gastronomy professor (my alma mater!) and food anthropologist Karen Metheny. A great read for breaking tension around the dinner table (lol, jk, this will definitely make it worse).

Over the past few months, I’ve talked to lots of folks about Election Cake and election related foods. I spoke with Jenny Comita about the power of political cakes for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. I chatted with Todd Price at USA Today about Vice President Kamala Harris’ love of cooking and the historical precedents of the women in federal offices and positions of power before her. And just last week, I unpacked Trump’s problematic eating habits within the larger cultural context of food and politics with Rachel Belle of the Your Last Meal podcast. I appreciate each and every opportunity because it’s a chance to highlight the power of food and demonstrate how everyday decisions that I, your grandma, and even the Vice President of the United States make about food have important political implications.

Election Cakes are often a favorite talking point because, well, I think the majority of folks still find cakes frivolous, surprising, and perhaps even unworthy of the gravitas of politics. And it just so happens that Election Cakes are historically associated with women who, until quite recently in the grand scheme of things, couldn’t vote let alone hold federal office. Although steadily increasing over the past century, women only made up 29% of the House of Representatives and 25% of the Senate of the 118th U.S. Congress. In June 2022, the white male dominated U.S. Supreme Court (in this case Barrett and Thomas both count as while males because they voted like one) overturned Roe V. Wade stripping women of fundamental rights to reproductive health care. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how the last female Democratic presidential candidate was treated during her campaign in 2016. Outside of the food community, Election Cakes remain a silly little historical sidebar because that’s how many people still perceive women in positions of political power.

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Historically, Election Cakes were simply cakes that fed a lot of people during election times, which were large in-person gatherings during the colonial era. Only white, male property-owners twenty-one and older could vote. Elections drew voters from their various properties to a central location, usually a large town or colonial capital, so travelers would often extend their stays or add other stops along the way. While women couldn’t vote, they could bend the ear of the voting-eligible men they hosted on election day. And at the very least, serving slices of cake allowed them access to political conversations they might otherwise miss.

The cakes themselves were traditional English style “plumb” cakes, a dense, yeast-risen and heavily spiced cake studded with dried fruits, spiked with spirits, and often frosted with a white icing that hardened over time. These cakes could be made in great quantity and were effectively shelf stable; they were the perfect bake for feeding a crowd of hungry voters who could arrive at various times. At this time, these cakes weren’t called “Election Cakes,” a term that would become popular a couple of decades after the American Revolutionary War. While some early American cookbooks included recipes for Election Cakes, they were largely indistinguishable from other cakes that were baked for similar big occasions such as weddings, funerals, and family gatherings. In her book American Cookery, Amelia Simmons’ Election Cake called for 30 quarts of flour, 10 pounds of butter, 14 pounds of sugar, 12 pounds of raisins, and 3 dozen eggs. Scaled down, her Election Cake is quite similar to her recipe for “Plumb Cake” and “A Rich Cake.”

As America the country was born and quickly evolved, Election Cakes became associated specifically with Hartford, Connecticut, a community that spared no expense in hosting lavish patriotic parades and balls to celebrate the election process. One of the most well known versions of the Hartford Election Cake comes from Hartford Election Cake and Other Receipts by Ellen Wadsworth Johnson published in 1889. The book contains twelve different (slight) variations on the traditional cake submitted by various women from Hartford and the surrounding area.

Despite the heavy reliance on food and cooking as part of the national suffrage movement, Election Cake was already a relic of the past by the late 1800s. The most well known suffrage cookbook, The Woman suffrage cook book (published in 1890), contained one recipe for "Mother's Election Cake" and was so styled because, after a century or so, "election cakes" were out of fashion and baking technologies and trends had advanced significantly thanks to gas ovens and packaged baking powder. Other cakes, especially those dressed in traditional Suffrage colors, became important elements of the early 20th century women’s movement, but those cakes don’t fit this narrative of Election Cake history. A tidy story connecting generations of American women and a singular cake recipe quickly seems to, if I may use a baking metaphor, curdle and separate like an over whipped buttercream that still tastes fine, but looks a little messy.

I don’t like the way most folks talk about Election Cake and the women who baked it. Every decade or so around a big election season, the Women’s Pages in newspapers ran exclamatory features with recipes about Ye Old Election Cake and how wild it was that cake could hold such historical power. And it’s always the same old story—look at those old colonial women doing what they could—and always told in a very demeaning, patronizing way. Exceptions include baker and food writer Keia Mastrianni’s coverage of the Old World Levain bakery in Asheville who started a Make America Cake Again campaign back in 2016. The bakery shared an updated Election Cake recipe on their website and were, as Mastrianni reported at the time, motivated to honor history and “reinvigorate the lost levity of the democratic process.” I also appreciated reading Election Cake insights on the labor required for keeping yeast in early American homes from baker Amy Halloran (author of the substack newsletter Dear Bread) last night as I finished rage writing this post. It reminded me of the Election Cake surge during the pandemic in 2020 when people turned their newborn sourdough skills to yeasted cakes during the campaign season. That’s the same year I started to really notice the other cakes in bakeries across the nation and on Instagram tagged with #electioncake.

Because election cake isn’t just a particular recipe, it’s an exercise is everyday politics. It’s a statement of community organizing. It’s a message from when women didn’t have an official voice and from now when women and many other marginalized groups still need others to help ensure their basic human rights. So to those who ask about the history of election cake, I will tell them about the colonial women who spent weeks saving loaf sugar, drying small fruits, and rationing spirits to make yeasted fruit cakes topped with a hard white icing that fed all the hungry men who came to town to vote. And to those who ask about election cake in general, I’ll tell them that any cake can be an election cake. A colonial-era inspired fruit cake you make in your 21st century kitchen with a little packet of yeast that you probably wont like the taste of in the end. A chiffon cake frosted in the suffrage green and purple. A towering layer cake covered in shredded coconut in a nod to Harris’ coconut tree comment. A cake posted on the Sweet Feminist Instagram feed that haunts JD Vance’s dreams and makes him spew falsehoods so incorrect that someone as icky as Joe Rogan has to correct him. A cookie cake piped with messages with a quote from a candidate, the stakes, or even just the words “VOTE.” All the beautiful cakes made by professional bakers like Paola, Natasha, Rose, Becca, and Doris who use their frosting-covered platforms for good, but also all the home bakers who fill the Internet with their different versions of #electioncake each election cycle. Those are all election cakes, too. 

Those election cake histories are important (I’m legally obligated to say that as a degree-conferred food scholar), but the Election Cakes being baked right now in our local bakeries and in home ovens matter more, especially this time. Largely because they represent all the progress American women have made and they remind us of all the work left to be done. This week’s Election Cakes are both a celebration of what we can do and a cautionary tale of all things we stand to lose.

Vote for women, vote for everyone, vote for Harris!

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Still haven’t voted? Click this link to find out where to vote in your area on Election Day.

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When we first moved to North Carolina we frequently ate at a little barbecue joint down the road from town. You ordered at the counter and then sat in rickety plastic chairs at oil-cloth covered tables while they brought you your selections. The day’s desserts were written out on a dry-erase board: multiple types of pie, a couple cobblers, and often a multi-layer Pig Pickin’ Cake topped with bright orange canned mandarin slices. A cake, I was told by the women at the counter and by other locals later on, that was the traditional bake served with North Carolina pork barbecue and historically brought to community pig roasts called “pig pickings.” A tidy little food history moment…or so I thought. The plot, much like the powdered-pudding-laced whipped frosting for this cake, thickens.

This cake screams corporate intervention. Aside from the southern-based Duncan Hines cake, none of these ingredients are grown in the south. The warm hues and balmy clime origins of the mandarins and pineapple, however, are prime for sunny southern mythology marketing. The recipe is almost always printed with explicit brand references (Duncan Hines yellow cake, Cool Whip) regardless of known geographic brand loyalties and is that perfect balance of short and easy that you might see printed on the bottom of a pudding box or included as part of an coupon advertisement in the local paper. Every ingredient, except for the eggs, comes from a can or package. The rub: I can’t seem to figure out which brand came up with it.

Let’s turn to the name of the cake instead. The concept of a pig picking isn’t new, but the Pig Pickin’ Cake is a different story. According to food historian John Shelton Reed, North Carolinians didn’t really even use the expression “pig-picking” until the 1970s. Historically, pigs were typically slaughtered “on the first autumn or winter day after the weather had turned frigid,” which allowed people enough time to smoke, cure, and preserve meat before the winter and avoid any warm-weather insects that might be attracted to the cooking process. Nowadays, pig pickings are held any time there’s enough people to gather to eat a whole pig. Nevertheless, the autumnal connection endures. Reed offers this explanation in advance of a recipe for a Pig-Pickin’ Cake, which he says is just a variation of a Pineapple Dream Cake, in his book Barbecue: A Savor the South Cookbook (2016).

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Starting in the 1970s, newspapers across the nation begin to question the origins of the Pig Pickin’ Cake. Some generalized it as monolithically Southern bake, others say it was a misunderstanding (due to those wacky southern accents, of course!) of the expression “Pea-Pickin’” which was already well known and associated with Tennessee-based American country music singer and television host, Ernie Ford. While hosting his self-named TV show, Ford coined the phrase, "Bless your pea-pickin' heart!" and also used it in his song writing. Interestingly, as his music career started to wane in the 1970s, Ford, along with his iconic phrase, became the spokesman for Nashville-based Martha White brand flour. Despite the clear potential for a Martha White origin story here, the cake doesn’t seem to come from there either.

Though there is clear disgust and disdain in the headlines, which seems to largely stem from readers worried about killing pigs, little is said about the other more concerning monikers for the cake and their ties to the South’s problematic history. Sure, casual racism was the norm in the 1970s and Southern mythology was reinforced by both indoctrinated southerners and non-southerners alike, but logistically speaking, cotton picking and pig picking are very different activities.

The Betty Crocker Sunshine Cake, referenced in several of the articles, is similarly made with a cake mix and a pudding-plus-whipped topping frosting, but it typically called for peaches and other fruits and not the classic Pig Pickin’ combo of pineapple and mandarin oranges. And in the grand history of cakes, these subtle differences matter. Which leads us to Nancy.

Who was Nancy Ware you might ask? I’m still not sure. There are numerous obituaries for Nancy Wares across the nation dating back decades and even a century or more. There was a Nancy Ware absolutely cleaning up the blue ribbons for baked goods (sadly no cakes though) on the county fair circuit in California in the 1960s. And there was a serial-style newspaper drama called Meal Ticket written by Fred Lape about a mother-daughter vaudeville act that featured two characters named Nancy and Lottie Ware from the 1930s. They never mention any cake though. Eventually the possessive apostrophe gets dropped and Nancy’s cake no longer belongs to her, but is her. And thus phrases such as “I’ve got Nancy Ware chilling in the fridge” become part of our collective cakelore.

To this day, the Nancy connection remains a mystery.

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I made a Pig Pickin’ Cake (dolled up with olive oil and yuzu) for the recent Cake Pickin’ event that I cohosted with my friend and fellow baker Oona of While You’re Up Bakery. We were inspired to host our own cake picnics after seeing our friend Elisa of Salted Rye over on the west coast bring together so many people over cake. This was our second gathering which we renamed Cake Pickin’ in honor of our North Carolina home. The local student paper The Daily Tar Heel came to our pickin’ and wrote up a nice little story about us, too!

If there’s one thing I want for the holidays this year, it’s cake. But not actually cake, just things that look like cake. In all the gift guides flooding our feeds and filling our inboxes, no one is attending to those of us who appreciate the ✨aesthetic✨ of cake. So I’m here to remedy that oversight (and maybe offer a few scholarly reflections on the meaning of things-that-look-like-cake-but-aren’t-cake material culture along the way). And there’s a piece of “cake” for everyone on your list including:

The one who doesn’t like overhead lighting: Pretty Shitty Cakes UO Exclusive Cake Table Lamp

A statement piece to be sure, this cake will light up their room and remind them of you each time they turn it on. Moreover, it will confuse anyone who visits as they’ll believe they’re about to be served a big slice of cake, but no, just some good, ambient light.

The one who likes to partake: Fake Cakery 4-Layer Cake Grinder

Love the play on layers here. Just make sure they know it’s not edible. Note: this one is sold out, but there’s lots of other flavors still available, I just needed this one to make a material culture point.

The one who likes to accessorize: Jenny Lemons Cake Slice Hair Claw

I hope you can tell by now that most of these fake-cake objects utilize a similar color scheme—red, white, and pink—and all rely on a layer-cake structure. This one even resembles the cake slice emoji (🍰). You might not have noticed, but your cake-loving friends sure have.

The one who likes to get dressed: Lisa Says Gah! “Dana” Long Sleeve Tee

Simple and festive. Perfect for all cake-friendly occasions, which IMO should be all occasions.

The one who likes to customize: The Gemini Bakes Horoscope Cake Stickers (and Frosting Washi Tape and Magnets and more!)

Disclaimer: I buy everything The Gemini Bakes makes. I’m obsessed with her work and think you and your cake loving friends should be, too. The sticker/magnet/keychain options feature an homage to a vintage cake series from the 1972 Wilton Cake Yearbook, so there’s some bonus food history involved.

The one who likes to have their cake and drink it, too: Packed Party Piece of Cake Sipper Set

Bonus: if your cake-lover likes to line up flights of little beverages, they can fill up each slice with a different sip! Or, you know, share with friends and family, I guess.

The one who likes to nap: UO Cake Tufted Throw Pillow

Literal sweet dreams with a slight variation on the standard pink-red-and-white combination. A design so recognizable we can put it on an oddly shaped pillow and still accept and understand it’s cake. The human brain is delightful.

The one who likes to deck the halls with buttercream: JoAnn’s 3" Christmas Treat Yourself Cake Glass Ornament

So much happening here. We’ve swapped in a sheetcake (probably still layered since it’s on a scalloped cakeboard) and those buttercream roses are giving grocery store bakery vibes. We’ve got a throwback phrase to an early 21st-century sitcom. I can’t wait for future generations to unpack this one.

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And if all these not-cake options won’t work, there’s always real-cake or the tools with which to make real-cake. I’d recommend a good bag of flour and a copy of Natasha Pickowicz More Than Cake: 100 Baking Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community, and lots of them are cake.

“Who in this patriotic country could let George and Martha Washington melt in their mouths and swallow a U.S. flag without feeling a swelling of national impulses.” The Grenada Sentinel, Saturday, March 2, 1907

I might get (American) pied in the face for this, but Ina Garten did not invent the American flag cake. And the star-spangled bake has been the centerpiece of Fourth of July picnics and other random patriotic holidays long before boxed cake mix and store-bought whipped cream made it the go-to, quick and easy cake of the season.

Since today is about leisurely patriotism (and, let’s be honest, day drinking), today’s post is largely visual. So grab a can of [future penknife sponsor’s name here] and get ready to scroll through the evolution of the American Flag cake.

One of the earliest mentions of American Flag cake I could find was from 1887 when Jennie Tims arrived home from Europe and was greeted with a welcoming party and a “grand spread” of American-themed eats including, importantly, potatoes.

By the late nineteenth-century, flag cakes of various types were common and desirable enough for local bakeries to market them in newspaper advertisements. And not just for the Fourth of July, but for other occasions throughout the calendar year, too.

This absolutely overthetop recipe for Ice Cream Forts published in the July 2, 1911 issue of The Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL) states that “flag cakes can be purchased in most places at this time of year” and tells you how to make them just in case your local bakery didn’t stock them.

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Flag cake was the perfect centerpiece for holidays like Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in February, Flag Day in mid-July, but also for naturalization ceremonies, DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) meetings (yikes!), and even the random birthday that happened to land somewhere nearish any of these patriotic occasions.

Not only were poor little Kathleen and Peter forced to share a birthday with each other, they had to cede their entire cake to America (as if she hadn’t already had enough birthdays by the 1960s).

Ironically, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, the DAR association of Michigan made a half-hearted attempt to cancel flag cakes, claiming them to be unpatriotic.

The flag cake ban clearly didn’t last long. Good job following directions, Connie, Mae, and Margaret, gah.

These earliest references didn’t include many helpful descriptions of how the cake was decorated or baked. At the turn of the twentieth-century, newspapers started to publish better instructions and even full recipes, such as this clipping from 1903 calling for pound cake, white icing, and chocolate stripes.

Bucking our now-traditional berry combo, early iterations of the flag cake utilized all types of decorations to achieve the iconic red, white, and blue design, including things like jellied cranberry cut into shapes, red and blue fruits, jams, sugared flowers, and artificial and natural food dyes such as cochineal and beet juice for bright red stripes.

I especially enjoy the various takes on the stars. Some bakers go all in and make one big star, others go for an early colonial version of the flag with the reasonable thirteen stars in a circle representing the original colonies. My favorites, however, are the cakes with the smattering of dots that give just enough of stars-vibe to work (especially after a day buzz).

Sizes varied, too. There were individual flag cakes like those featured in the February 1914 issue of Good Housekeeping. Others were, well, American-sized. In 1980, the Citizen Register from Ossining, NY, reported on a “red, white and blue American flag cake weighing 19,000 pounds” and raised $12,000 for charity.

Despite its long history and the deftness with which we justify making flag cakes for pretty much any occasion (looking at you Kathleen and Peter’s mom), it’s hard to beat the now classic strawberries-and-blueberries spangled whipped cream cake. If anyone gets credit for popularizing this modern version, it's the Cool Whip marketing team.

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Now that you’ve had your fill of flag cake, dive into the history of American through pies in Sweet Land of Liberty by the brilliant baker and writer Rossi Anastopoulo. You can learn more about Rossi and see her perfectly baked baked goods over on her Instagram, too.

In the traditional greeting of my homeland: Howdy. I guess the first thing you should know about me is that I’m from Texas. A place where the chocolate sheet cakes are as wide and as flat as the prairie and the kolaches are as sweet as the sun is hot. And the cowboy cake, don’t get me started on the cowboy cake.

But let’s talk a bit about me, the person behind Penknife and the newsletter so many of you have signed up to read (omg! thank you), before we get into the baked goods.

As my mother told it, I was born in a cabbage patch (i.e. the late 80s when cabbage patch dolls were all the rage and I supposedly possessed a nose similar to said toy) at 9:27 PM on a Tuesday in mid-September. The drive to the hospital was fraught as our cat was also in labor and my mother threatened my father with words I will likely never know if he didn’t stop at the vet hospital before heading to the human one. As my father tells it, I entered the world bright eyed and bushy tailed, similar to our momma cat’s litter of kittens that were born just on the other side of town.

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Much like everyone else, I grew up around food (we all have to eat, I’m not special) and mine looked like blue-ribbon bakes at county fairs, farm eggs from neighbors, dewberries from the brambles in our back yard, all types of wild game from my father’s work, layer cakes from my cottage home baking grandmother, tortillas and tamales from my other grandmother who lived near the border, and also plenty of peanut butter and jelly, cinnamon toast, chicken spaghetti, and other less romanticized stuff.

I’ve eaten a lot of food over the years and can dole out food puns by the baker’s dozen; let’s borrow some of that food television baking magic and speed things up here…

• I wanted to go to culinary school after high school, but my parents (and a few rather misogynistic white male chefs I knew) said not to, so I didn’t.

• Instead I found every opportunity to study food instead, taking every food studies course offered at my undergraduate university (hook ‘em) and writing my honors thesis on Jane Austen and gastronomic gentility (which was really just an excuse to study abroad and consume lots of tea and pastries under the guise of research).

• I then went on to get my MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University, a program co-founded by scholars and chefs Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. While there I met one of the best people I know, food editor for The Boston Globe, Sheryl Julian, who launched my food writing and recipe testing career.

• Eager for punishment and more food studies, I moved to North Carolina to complete my PhD in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While here I’ve co-written a cookbook, associate edited a book on the state’s food landscape, and collaborated with dozens of wonderful food folks in and out of academia, across the state and beyond.

• I now work as the Director of Communications for the Museum of Food and Drink in New York City and convince people across the nation to publish my thoughts and musings on food and foodways and how it relates to gender, class, digital media, and more.

I know a lot about food, but in my job as a food scholar, I constantly find myself learning new things about the stuff. For example, the origins of my mother’s prized Cowboy Coffee Cake.

While working with my fellow editor on a big (and very exciting - more to come) southern women and recipes project, I confidently talked up the southernness and truly Texan origins of Cowboy Cake and Cowboy Bread. Presumably due to her South Texas upbringing where she must have first learned this recipe, my mother sometimes erroneously called it pan de campo, Spanish for “camp” or “country” bread and an allusion to a very Texan heritage of vaqueros and cowboys who drove cattle across the state and ate their breads (and I suppose cakes, too) around camp fires. Despite the recipe title (you’ll see below), we humbly called “Cowboy Bread” in our house. Topped with a cinnamon-sugar streusel, leavened with a hefty amount of baking soda, and spooned into loaf pans, I knew this recipe was far flung from any chuck wagon cast iron heritage, but, hey, it was my mom’s recipe so what was I going to do.

Well, I went into the archives and left utterly devastated. Not only was Cowboy Cake, at least my mother’s version, not exclusively Texan, it wasn’t even a family or passed-down recipe. I found versions of the recipe from across the nation, most notably from states without any historical cowboy culture like Pennsylvania, Maine, and Massachusetts. There were decades of mentions of cowboy bread and cowboy cake in school lunch menus printed in weekly local newspapers. One school cafeteria worker admits to calling a coffee cake “Cowboy Bread” for fun and to convince small children to eat it. Did my mom do this, too?! And several recipes claim they originated from a government cookbook (I’m still looking for it). I even found, to my horror, a 1960 recipe from Omaha, Nebraska that seems to have been developed by the Northern Natural Gas Company and published as a type of subversive ad for gas ovens.

Is this life-altering research the food-studies themed foundation of my villain origin story? Maybe? I have this recipe in my mother’s handwriting framed and hanging in my kitchen. It was one of the first recipes I tested, styled, shot, and published. To use a scholarly phrase: I am shook. But also, I’m just hungry for a slice of Cowboy Cake now. In the end, my takeaway from this experience is that it’s important to never stop learning about food…and then turning it into publishable content for your readers. Thanks, mom. Here’s her recipe:

Anyways, that’s me. I wanted anyone who reads Penknife to know a bit more about me and how I come to the wild (and sometimes duplicitous) world of food studies. Thank y’all for being here and for being mighty hungry for more food stories.

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For more thoughts on food, cooking, women, and general wit, I recommend with all my heart Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson. I’ve followed Johnson for a while in her role as co-editor of Vittles, a food and culture Substack newsletter based in the UK and India. Basically, I’m obsessed with her and think you should be, too.

From now on, please address me as Dr. Penknife. After seven long years (.5 of which was spent on maternity leave and another 1.5 of it turned into a leave of absence during the global pandemic as I pivoted to being a stay-at-home-mom-homeschool-teacher-food-scholar-in-limbo), I am graduating with my PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There’s a lot to unpack there (you can read my piece on trying to maintain my food scholar identity during that forced leave over on Gastronomica), but for now, we celebrate…with cake!

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Earlier this week, I read a brilliant historical deep dive on “Wedding Cake Toppers: Miniatures, Excess, and Fantasy” by Kendall DeBoer and oooh-ed and ughh-ed over the fantastically problematic cake toppers featured throughout. Curiosity piqued, I headed to Etsy to see what was available for graduation cakes. And though graduations, referring mostly to those at the secondary education level, do not carry the same exact gendered baggage as matrimony, the milestone is not devoid of stereotype. The query “vintage graduation cake toppers” yielded several entries that looked like this:

There were cake toppers with women, too, though there were some differences.

Noticeably, despite my catch-all query, there were no cake-toppers-of-color entries. Not even a single one amongst the batch of toppers collected from multiple decades (seen above). There were, however, several genderless (maybe?) owls.

While I expected a gendered division based on robe color, there were listings for both men and women in white. That said, there were more women graduate cake toppers decked out in head-to-toe white regalia.

You might think: white is just another school color, it’s neutral, even. Or maybe you wore white to your own graduation. Sure, those are all acceptable thoughts, but they still don’t account for the gendered skew in white-hued cake toppers or the even more blatant historical association between June brides and women graduates. In some cases, they appeared in the same newspaper article (in the Women’s Section, of course).

For June grads who weren’t getting married, the white regalia was certainly a nod towards their next expected milestone, which would inevitably be celebrated by an elaborate layer cake. Wedding or graduation, the air was “filled with romance and freedom” and copious amounts of buttercream. I’m still completely baffled that no one thought to create a changeable women graduate cake topper that, with a few deft swaps, could be restyled as a bride.

The “smart feminine graduate” knew that nothing was more alluring to a potential husband than a “pretty figure in cap and gown” (a notoriously sexy garment) and a layer cake.

Now, I know you’re probably wondering: what will your graduation cake topper be, Dr. Penknife? Well, seeing as I am a married, mother-of-two, doctoral graduate, I’m afraid my topper options are quite slim. Once again, this would be a great time for a changeable cake topper, but I’m afraid society can’t fathom someone being all those things at once, so I guess I’ll go with the owls.

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The perfect gift for the smart, baking graduate, regardless of gender or marital status: More Than Cake: 100 Baking Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community by Natasha Pickowicz (follow her and all her amazing community care work here).

May Day, a day historically associated with spring renewal, growth, and radical socialism, feels like an appropriate occasion to step into this new space of writing, recipes, and history after years of putting my work on the back burner. I’m pleased and only the slightest bit queasy about launching penknife, a newsletter about food stories, recipes, and bite-sized bits of food history. So grab a napkin, this story gets messy.

For many cultures over many generations, the first of May, or May Day, was a day to celebrate the arrival of spring. Communities celebrated the shift in agriculture, welcomed spring and all things fertile, blessed butter churns and milk cows in hopes of a prosperous season. In the Gaelic community, May Day is also known as Beltane, a major seasonal fire festival alongside Samhain in the fall and Lughnasadh in the late summer. In Eastern European countries, May Day has both pagan and Christian origins and is usually a day dedicated to welcoming the new season and warding off evil in various forms. Many include a maypole as part of their celebrations. Each culture celebrates May Day with specific foods and dishes, too, including butter and beer in Great Britain; a type of mead and fried dough cakes in Finland; and eggs and sweets in Italy.

May Day remained a religious or cultural holiday up until the late nineteenth-century, when it became associated with the growing socialism movement in the United States (ironic isn’t it?). On May 1st, 1886, industrial workers across the United States went on strike, demanding an 8-hour workday. This date would later become known as part of the larger Haymarket Affair, so named for the peaceful protests that turned violent in the Haymarket Square in Chicago as part of the larger nationwide strike.

A few years later, the International Socialist Conference declared May 1st International Workers' Day in honor of the efforts and lives lost during the Haymarket Affair in 1886. Today, many countries use the term May Day or Labor Day for May, 1. But in the United States, we celebrate Labor Day in September and it is rarely associated with socialism or any of these historic events (seriously, we don’t even learn about them in school!).

Fast forward to the numerous Red Scares that occurred after both WWI and WWII, when the United States government promoted the fear of communist and socialist uprisings in America. The first Red Scare was specifically in response to the American Labor Movement of the 1910s and 1920s and warned the public about the danger of strikes, unionizing, and workers’ rights. 

Around this time, recipes for May Day Cake featuring candy maypoles with matching ribbons started popping up in newspapers and cookbooks across the nation as part of the American May Day revival. This informal revival was born of the nationwide fear of change and the moral welfare of America’s working (and largely immigrant) class. With the advent of the 8-hour work day and the new “abundance” of non-working hours, social reformers from the wealthier (business owning) classes aimed to redirect worker’s attentions to wholesome and traditional American pastimes. And so they brought back, among many other things, May Day and added a few very American flourishes, too.

Of course, these May Day cakes didn't reference the already popular International Workers' Day version of May Day, but instead looped back to the original pagan holiday that celebrated the changing seasons, women, and fertility but was also, most importantly, part of America's constructed white, Anglo-Saxon past. These recipes are wholly American, calling for ingredients such as boxed cake mix, assembly in tube pans or tall, thick layers, and topped with traditional American buttercream (a mixture of powdered sugar, butter, and a little bit of cream). Later recipes suggest tinting the cake and/or the frosting in pale spring hues of green and rose. America was so afraid of labor unions and workers rights, it appears to have momentarily ignored its Puritanical ways to embrace the "lesser evil" of pagan fertility cakes. Whatever proved distracting from the growing interest in unions and workers’ rights.

May Day cakes seemed to fall out of favor around the 1970s (the last mention I could find in our historical newspaper database), but likely popped up here and there as spring or summer birthday cakes or were served at bridal shower luncheons during the appropriate season. None of these recipes even hinted at a connection to May Day’s other well-known socialist history, but with the current renewed interest in social reforms and work-life balance, perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of May Day cakes with maypoles once again.

Contemporary cake interpretation:

May Day Cake with yellow layer cake, elderflower and honey soak, American buttercream and strawberries, local edible flowers, beeswax candle maypole, no ribbons (because that just seems like a fire hazard, honestly).

Frosted on top in green, “bread and roses” is a phrase that is commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, often referred to as the "Bread and Roses strike". The phrase is a metaphor appealing for both fair wages and dignified conditions, and is sometimes alternatively explained as the fight for fair work as well as intellectual respect.

Nothing feels more like a perfect combination of the traditional religious holiday and the social movement memorial than a cake of classic May Day symbols (flowers, honey, eggs, fire) topped with a phrase that has meant so much for American working women.

TLDR TikTok:

When writing feels insurmountable, I turn to social media to distill a bit of food history into bite-sized pieces for a too-quick TikTok or a rambling Instagram post. As intentional as I aim to be about making and curating public history, these platforms simply don’t provide enough time to properly unpack these subjects and rarely give the opportunity for citations or further reading. So if you’d like the shortest, food scholar approved version of this story, watch my TikTok:

@foodherstorythe pay is horrible, but at least there's cake. #mayday #beltane #foodhistory #cottagecore #cake #historytiktok #workersday #fyp

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Bibliography and Digital Resources:

• American Labor Movement

• US Red Scares

• Beltane

• May Day Revival

• Cake Politics

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Pairs well with:

Through her social media feeds and her LA whole grain micro bakery Red Bread, baker Rose Wilde serves up delicious bakes with plenty of food politics, too. Her debut cookbook Bread and Roses has been on my to-read list for quite some time and now it’s available for pre-order!

Bread and Roses: 100+ Grain Forward Recipes featuring Global Ingredients and Botanicals by Rose Wilde (follow her at @trosewilde over on Insta).