Cake by Nicola Humble

Author:Nicola Humble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Jacob Jordaens, The Bean King, c. 1655, oil on canvas.

The feast of Epiphany became a popular genre subject for painters in the seventeenth century. The first to tackle the theme appears to have been the Antwerp painter Jacob Jordaens, whose depiction of The Bean King (c. 1655) shows a rowdy gathering in the midst of toasting the old man who has been crowned king. Over a hundred years later, in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Epiphany (Le gâteau des rois) of 1774, the scene is one of idealized domestic calm, as the children of a peasant family search pieces of cake for the glory-conferring bean. The shift in the focus of the scene from adults to children, drunkenness to calmness, may map a growing cultural anxiety about the celebration in Protestant Europe. It was concern at the pagan origins of the feast that eventually put paid to the British Twelfth Cake. This version was a fruit cake – yeast-raised in earlier periods. After the Reformation the church removed Twelfth Night as a religious festival; it was revived as a purely secular feast in the late seventeenth century, when a series of tokens began to be included in the cake. Henry Teonge, a naval captain, described in 1676 a Twelfth Cake and associated celebration enjoyed at sea:

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