Wedding Cakes+cultural History Book

	List of illustrations
	Foreword
	Preface
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	Preliminaries
1	The British wedding cake in the late twentieth century	11
	Cakes in weddings	11
	Their form and ranges of variation	13
	The changing trade in the 1980s	14
	Does a wedding cake mean anything?	17
2	How distinctive is the British cake?	20
	Europe	20
	America	22
	Australia	24
	Outwith the west	26
	Themes	28
3	Cultural creation: myth, history and language	29
	The Victorian myth of origin	29
	Cultural history and its problems	31
	Recipes as evidence	32
	'Wedding cake' and 'bride cake': terms in language	35
4	When the wedding cake was not yet and might never have been	37
	Feasts, food and subtleties	37
	Cake, great cakes and marriage rites	41
	Alternatives and their persistence	46
Pt. II	The making of the British wedding cake
5	Great cakes, plum(b) cakes and bride cakes	53
	Great cakes for weddings	53
	From great cakes to plum(b) cakes	54
	The bride cake	56
	Cakes for weddings and other festivities	60
6	Confectionery and icing	64
	Sugarpaste and the beginnings of confectionery	64
	Marchpanes	65
	The development of icing	67
	Double icing	70
	Marzipan	72
	Decoration and colour	74
	Piping: 'a new art form'	77
7	The rise of the Victorian cake and its successors	82
	Pieces montees	82
	Royal weddings and the high rising cake	83
	The trade and the three-tier standard	87
	Separating the tiers	89
	Colour, top pieces and other ornamentation	92
Pt. III	Users, uses and meanings
8	Uses and their evolution	101
	Cake-breaking	101
	Dreaming and divination	107
	Display	111
	Cutting the cake	112
	Keeping it for the christening	117
	Conclusion: uses and forms	119
9	Meanings and interpretation	121
10	Towards a theory of cultural change?	128
	Objects, custom and meanings	129
	Phenomena of cultural change	132
	Postscript	141
	Notes	143
	Bibliography	151
	Index	159