Twelfth Night: from cakes to crackers

In 1849, the Illustrated London News featured Queen's Victoria's Twelfth Night Cake, celebrating the the Epiphany, the coming of the Three Kings, developed from the pagan Roman Feast of Saturnalia.  Early cakes  contained a bean and a pea, to determine who should be King and Queen of Misrule for the night.  By the later eighteenth century, chefs learnt to use eggs as raising agents, and rich fruit mixtures replaced the old fashioned yeast or batter type, fruit decorated cakes, growing ever larger and elaborately iced.    The first printed Twelfth Cake recipe* is that of John Mollard, of the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, in 1803,  and he seems to have been the inspiration for this description from R.H.Horne's Memoirs of a London Doll of 1846:

"Sir, said he, "this is a Twelfth-cake of very superior make.  It was made by my grandfather himself, who is known to be one of the first makers in all Bishopsgate street: I may say the very first.  There is no better in all the world.  You see how heavy it is; what a quantity of plums, currants, butter, sugar, and orange and lemon-peel there is in it, besides brandy and caraway confits. See! what a beautiful frost -work of white sugar there is all over the top and sides!  See, too, what characters there are, and made in sugar of all colours! Kings and Queens in their robes, and lions and dogs, and Jem Crow, and Swiss cottages in winter, and railway carriages, and girls with tambourines, and a village steeple with a cow looking in at the porch; and all these standing or walking, or dancing upon white sugar, surrounded with curling twists and true lover's knots in pink and green citron, with damson cheese and black currant paste between.  You never saw such a cake before, sir, and I'm sure none of your family ever smelt any cake at all like it.  It's quite a nosegay for Queen Victoria herself; and if you were to buy it at my grandfather's shop you would have to pay fifteen shillings and more for it."

Another part of the fun and games was the allotting of "characters". They were sold in sets, and could be comic:  

or even political:

This cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank of 16th January 1779 refers to Sir Francis Burdett's campaign to reform the dreadful Coldbathfields or Middlesex Prison, known as the English Bastille.

By 1866, the Queen herself pronounced the Twelfth Night celebrations as un-Christian, and Mrs Beeton's recipe book omitted the Bean and Pea.  Gradually the  outrageous antics and traditional rituals were  tamed and transformed  (helped along by commercialism) into  the iced Christmas cake, the silver coins or charms in the Christmas pudding, and the jokes and paper hats in the crackers. 

I  am not superstitious, but I still feel compelled to take down the last of my Christmas decorations before midnight tonight!

*see bjws.blogspot.com for Mollard's recipe