Battenburg Cake History Again!

Delving into the true history of our foods is always much more rewarding than blindly accepting the tired old clichés and myths that are often used to explain their origins. I have already in two earlier postings tried to unravel the complex history of the popular Battenburg Cake, but the more I look at this subject, the more puzzling it becomes. A popular theory about its origin tells us it was made to celebrate an important Victorian royal wedding in 1884. In a 2003 newspaper article, food historian Catherine Brown tells us,

'But there was nothing to compare with the German pastry cooks' sophisticated use of marzipan, colours, shapes, flavours and allegorical designs. The British were impressed. They tried their hand at the German techniques and some native pastry cooks became almost as good as the Germans. Such was their confidence that when Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, married Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884, it was decided that a celebration cake was required, in their own design of course, but appropriately German in style to celebrate the marriage. What else to call it but a Battenberg cake? It was to be unique: a cake to stun British cake-lovers. They took inspiration from the German rococo style of architecture which featured gold (marzipan) with pastel colours (pink and yellow sponge).'*

This all sounds plausible, but Brown does not inform us of her sources. I would love to know who it was who decided that a celebration cake was required. Until Catherine Brown can point out the primary sources for these statements, I am inclined to believe that she is simply repeating a popular anecdote which appears to have surfaced fairly recently and has no basis in fact. In a recent Great British Bake Off programme, the television historian Kate Williams repeated the same myth.

My good friend Robin Weir, knowing my interest in the Battenburg, was amazed to recently come across an illustrated recipe for an identical cake called Gateau à la Domino in a July 1898 edition of the Victorian food and housekeeping magazine The Table, published and edited by the remarkable Mrs Agnes Berthe Marshall. Although Mrs Marshall's four books on cookery and ice cream are now fairly well known, The Table is rarely cited, though it is one of the most extensive and richest sources on the domestic life and food of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She launched it on 12th June 1886. There were 1690 weekly issues until June 1918. It was then renamed The Table and Housekeeper's Journal and was published fortnightly with 547 issues until its demise in September 1939. In its day The Table was the most important food magazine published in Britain. Mrs Marshall died in 1905, but The Table went on and on.

Mrs Marshall's recipe for Domino Cake appeared in 1898, the same year in which recipes for two almost identical cakes - Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake and Robert Well's Neapolitan Roll were published. In appearance, Vine's cake is identical to Marshall's with nine panes of alternate pink and white genoese enclosed in an overcoat of almond paste. Well's cake on the other hand, with its four panes is closer to the modern version that we call Battenburg Cake today. If you have not read my earlier posts on this subject, here are some images to show you what these three cakes looked like. 

Mrs Marshall's Gateau à la Domino from The Table,  July 2nd 1898

Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake from Saleable Shop Goods 1898 - nine panels

 

Wells does not illustrate his cake. so I made his Neapolitan Roll from the recipe he published in Cakes and Buns (1898). Unlike Marshall's and Vine's versions, Well's cake was dusted with pink desiccated coconut and has only four panes. 

It may be that there are other recipes. I have not had a chance to look through the late nineteenth century numbers of the trade magazine The British Baker and Confectioner, which was edited by Vine, so the jury is still out as to who first devised the recipe. To me however one thing is sure, that the myth about the cake having four sections to commemorate the four Battenburg princes is total rubbish. And I am also now very sceptical about the unsubstantiated claim that this cake was originally invented to commemorate the wedding in 1884 of Prince Louis of Battenburg to Princess Victoria. If this was so, why does Mrs Marshall twelve years after the wedding call it a Domino Cake and Wells a Neapolitan Roll?  Below is Mrs Marshall's full recipe, published here courtesy of Robin Weir, who is Britain's leading authority on this remarkable lady.  I have a nagging suspicion that Mrs Marshall may have invented the cake, but cannot prove it. With its vanilla and maraschino flavoured almond paste, her version is more sophisticated than either Vine's or Well's, whose simpler recipes were designed for the trade rather than the domestic cake maker. She also copyrighted her recipe - see below - and declared that it was new. Perhaps the other two pinched it and renamed it in order to disguise their source. So to take a terrible liberty with Gertrude Stein's well known phrase relating to a well known flower, "A domino cake, is a Neapolitan roll, is a Battenburg cake.'

Domino Cakes were normally small rectangles of genoese decorated with icing in the form of dominoes, as No. 4 in this fine chromolithograph by Kronheim from Mary Jewry, Warne's Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book (London: 1868).

What is overlooked in all the Battenburg Cake myths is that there were actually two weddings between English princesses and Battenburg princes. The first was that of Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's grandaughter, to Louis of Battenburg in 1884. The second took place the following year, when Louis's brother Henry married Queen Victoria's youngest child Beatrice. The bride cake illustrated above is that presented to Henry and Beatrice at their wedding in 1885. When they cut this remarkable cake, I wonder if there was a pattern of red-white-red-white running all the way through it.

*Catherine Brown, Battenberg Cake; A celebration confection fit to grace a royal wedding. The Herald, March 29th 2003.

Read my other two posts on Battenburg Cake -

Battenburg Cake - the Truth

Battenburg Cake Revisited and Neapolitan Roll Rediscovered

Battenburg Cake Revisited, or Neapolitan Roll Rediscovered

Robert Wells

I recently tried to sort out some of the nonsense that is commonly written about the Battenburg Cake (see posting for August 2011). I described how the earliest recipe for a multi-coloured Battenburg Cake was published by Frederick Vine in 1898. Vine's cake had nine panes rather than the four that make up the modern cake.

Cover of Wells's Cakes and Buns.

However, the story of Battenburg Cake's origins is more complicated than I thought. I recently discovered a recipe for a cake called Neapolitaine Roll in a small book - Cakes and Buns written by a contemporary of Vine called Robert Wells. Wells was a prolific author on bakery and confectionery matters, who like Vine wrote mainly for the trade. A preface in my copy of the second edition (undated) of Cakes and Buns is dated 1897, so the book was probably first published, or at least written in that year. The British Library catalogue lists an edition published in 1898. What is curious about Neapolitaine Roll is that it is identical to a modern four pane Battenburg Cake, except for  a coating of pink coconut which encases the almond paste. Here is Wells's recipe.

Neapolitaine Roll (sic.)

Cut from your Genoese cake two strips of plain
 cake about one inch square, and the length being the
 width of your tin upon which it is baked. Likewise 
two similar strips from the " Raspberry Genoese." 
Place these together with apricot jam. If made hot
 you can apply it much better with the aid of a small, clean grease brush. Place the coloured strips alternately, so that the pink strip rests upon the white
 strip, and the other white upon the red, making a
 square with the four strips. Take and roll a sheet 
of almond paste, making the width to cover the four 
sides, and the length the same as the cake. When
 you have rolled your almond paste out you must cut 
to the size required with a knife. See that it does not
 stick to the slab, dust with a little icing sugar. Take 
your brush and slightly moisten, just sufficiently to
 make it adhere to the cake, then lay the cake upon it, commencing by carefully laying at the edge and gently 
pressing. It will turn over with the paste adhering to
 the cake. Having got the almond paste right round, see that it thoroughly holds to the cake by gently
 pressing with the palm of the hand all over. Again I brush on apricot jam, and roll on pink cocoanut. Sell at 1/- and 1/4 per lb.
 This is a very simple yet a very pretty and
 attractive cake.

From Robert Wells, Cakes and Buns. Manchester: 2nd edition nd.c.1900. pp.42-43.

Neapolitan Roll - an 1898 sponge and marzipan cake by Robert Wells. Don't mistake this for Battenburg cake, which had nine panes - not four at this period. Unlike Battenburg Cake, Neapolitan Roll was dusted with pink desiccated coconut. 

So during the closing years of the nineteenth century, there was a four-pane cake with alternate pink and white genoise square sections wrapped in almond paste, just like a modern Battenburg Cake, but it was known as Neapolitan Roll. This cake co-existed in late Victorian England with a similar, but nine-pane cake, which was called the Battenburg Cake, at least by Vine and a few other professionals. This new evidence makes me believe even more strongly that the story about each pane of the Battenburg Cake representing one of the four Battenburg princes is a later twentieth century fabrication. Neither Vine or Wells mention this story and Wells does not associate his cake with the Battenburg family at all, even though its morphology is much closer to the four pane version we consider to be the 'traditional' Battenburg cake today. 

Wells may have called his cake a Neapolitan Roll because of its similarity to the striped Neapolitan ice cream, which was very popular at this period. Striped jellies known as ribbon or ribband jelly had been popular since the seventeenth century. Neapolitan Roll was very much in this decorative tradition of English food. Interestingly, in twenty first century US, Neapolitan Roll Cake or Neapolitan Jelly Roll, is what we in Britain call Swiss Roll. Why did Wells call his cake a roll, when it is actually square? Probably because the almond paste is rolled round the four strips of genoese to create the marzipan jacket.

A Neapolitan brick of ice cream - also known in the nineteenth century as hokey pokey

There were other cakes in the late Victorian period which were also called Neapolitan Cakes. These were usually made by building up layers of almond cake with different coloured jams spread in between. So Neapolitan meant stripes. However, some Neapolitan cakes only revealed their stripes when they were sliced, as they were often elaborately decorated on the surface with cut-out shapes made from puff pastry, as in the illustration below. Many types of Neapolitan cake with coloured stripes or checkered patterns are still made today. Well's recipe indicates that the Battenburg cake was a variation on this theme that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.

Neapolitan Cake from T. Garrett. The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery. London: 1890.

A menu for refreshments for a Bicycle Gymkhana I recently came across in a Victorian scrap book. 

Original source and date unknown.

Our Victorian ancestors loved colourful novelty cakes like the Neapolitan Roll and the Battenburg. Perhaps the most fun member of the genus was the Domino Cake, which was a Genoese fancy decorated to resemble a domino. These were made in sets, but I wonder if they actually played dominoes with them?

Above is an extraordinary bill of fare for refreshments for a Victorian 'Bicycle Gymkhana' in which Domino Cakes feature. You will notice that there is also a recipe for them. They are coated in maraschino icing. What a wonderful and sophisticated selection of picnic dishes this is. The spiced beef and cucumber sandwiches sound delicious, as do the three flavours of ices and iced drinks. And as for the very molecular sounding fruit "foam"at this early period, eat your hearts out Feran and Heston - there is nothing new under the sun. It would seem that "foams" were being served at Victorian bicycle gymkhanas well over a hundred years before they arrived at either elBulli or the Fat Duck!

A domino cake from T. Percy Lewis and A. G. Bromley's The Book of Cakes (London: 1903)

Since this was published, we have discovered more about Battenburg Cake - Click here to find out more

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