In 18thc America, Christmas was celebrated as the beginning of a long winter holiday season that didn’t end until Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, in January. There might not have been a modern Santa Claus or Christmas tree, but there were a great many parties, dinners, balls, weddings, and other celebrations that centered around festive food and drink.
One of the highlights in wealthier households was a special Twelfth Night cake. Often called a Great Cake, this was an ancestor of today’s holiday fruitcakes, dense and rich. There are numerous surviving 18thc recipes, but the one that was first published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse contains all the essential elements: pounds of butter, currants, almonds, candied fruit, flour, eggs, and multiple spices, and both sack (sherry wine) and French brandy; some versions used rum instead. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can try the modernized recipe here, though be forewarned: following 18thc tradition, it makes one very large cake, or two cakes in contemporary Bundt pans.
In the 18thc, a Twelfth Night cake would have not only been a large cake, but an extravagant and expensive one, too. Many of the ingredients that can today be easily purchased in a modern grocery store only arrived in a colonial kitchen after a lengthy (and often hazardous) voyage from a faraway port. The sack and sherry, sugar, almonds, currants, and many of the spices would have been imported and considered luxuries. The hostess who could present a Twelfth Night cake to her guests was making a statement about the prosperity as well as the hospitality of the household. No wonder a Twelfth Night cake was considered a fitting grand finale for the holidays.
The more sophisticated cakes were covered with snowy-white icing (a version of the modern royal icing), and then decorated with piping and three-dimensional figures made of sugar. Sugar-swans swimming around the top of the cake were particularly popular. Likely beyond the skill of most home bakers at the time, the decorated cakes were usually the work of talented full-time cooks - many of whom in 18thc America were enslaved. The fancier cakes became silent, sugary proof of even further wealth, sufficient to hire - or own - the cooks able to create them.
In my historical novel The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr, my heroine Mary is newly-arrived in the colony of New Jersey in 1774. Working in the kitchen and training to be a cook herself, she learns how to make and decorate Theodosia Prevost’s extravagant Twelfth Night cake from the older, more experienced cook Chloe:
“On a cold, clear day in January, Chloe and I were together piping white sugared icing over the sides of the Great Cake for Mistress’s Twelfth Night supper. The cake truly was aptly named, dark and heavy with wine-soaked fruit beneath the icing, and larger than any other I’d ever baked. Chloe had already made the twelve little sugar swans that had been set aside to harden before they were placed in a circle around the top of the cake.”*
The 18thc-style Great Cake shown, above, was baked by Danielle Funiciello for the 2018 Twelfth Night celebration at the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, NY. This cake was part of the site’s annual holiday celebration, open to the public. Considering how the house’s original owners, tGeneral Philip and Catherine Schuyler and their family (including second daughter Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, wife of Alexander Hamilton) were famous for their hospitality, I expect there will be another cake in January 2020, too. See here for more information.
Curious about the unusual wallpaper in the background behind the cake? It also has a story of its own - see here.
* Excerpt from The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr ©2019 Susan Holloway Scott.
Above: Twelfth Night cake, Schuyler Mansion. Photograph ©2018 Jessie Serfilippi.
Read more about Alexander and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton in my historical novel I, Eliza Hamilton; order here. My latest historical novel, The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr, is now available everywhere. Order here.