Wedding Cakes & Cultural Hist

by Charsley, Simon

• ISBN13: 9780415026499
• ISBN10: 0415026490
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1992-06-05
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The wedding cake is one of the most extraordinary of the familiar objects of the western world. In this unique contribution to the anthropology of food, Simon R. Charsley traces its fascinating history, from late medieval feasts and rites, through Victorian wedding breakfast and into the present. He shows that the wedding cake provides a vivid illustration of the traditions and traditional values inherent in all foods and demonstrates the part that material culture plays in the process of change.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. viii
Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Preliminaries	p. 9
The British Wedding Cake in the Late Twentieth Century	p. 11
How Distinctive is the British Cake?	p. 20
Cultural Creation	p. 29
When the Wedding Cake Was Not Yet and Might Never Have Been	p. 37
The Making of the British Wedding Cake	p. 51
Great Cakes, Plum(B) Cakes and Bride Cakes	p. 53
Confectionery and Icing	p. 64
The Rise of the Victorian Cake and Its Successors	p. 82
Users, Uses and Meanings	p. 99
Uses and Their Evolution	p. 101
Meanings and Interpretation	p. 121
Towards a Theory of Cultural Change?	p. 128
Postscript	p. 141
Notes	p. 143
Bibliography	p. 151
Index	p. 159
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