LOOKING for Christmas cakes, pies, and biscuits? Locally Yours has you covered. And if you were wondering how certain treats became synonymous with Christmas, we have you covered.
To celebrate seven weeks to Christmas we take a look at the origins of some of the most iconic Christmas desserts.
Locally Yours also reminds customers to get their orders in for Christmas Cakes as the cakes are made in advance and orders close soon
Christmas cake
According to Britishfoodhistory.com the Christmas cake as we know it comes from two Christian feast days: Twelfth Night and Easter.
When families in the sixteenth century made their Christmas puddings for the big day, they would often use some of the mixture, with the addition of flour and eggs, to bake and eat for Easter Time. These were obviously rather rich families. It was liked so much that the rich fruit cake was made for Christmas too. We also dropped it from the Easter menu for some reason.
The addition of the marzipan and royal icing came much later when a cake was banned from Christmas. The last day of Christmas is Twelfth Night (the 5th of January) and it used to be traditional to make a Twelfth Night cake that contained almonds and was covered in marzipan.
Oliver Crowell, the Lord Protector of England, and the other Puritans banned the feasting on that special day in the 1640s (he also banned mince pies as well) complaining that there was too much excess. Christmas Day remained a public holiday and some feasting was allowed, so people simply made their Christmas cake and covered that in marzipan instead, and so the Christmas cake was born.
Christmas Mince pies
According to GreatBritishChefs.com the first mention of a luxurious, sweet, spiced ‘pye’ can be found in the fourteenth-century cookbook The Forme of Cury, which describes a dish of minced pork embellished with honey, dried fruits, wine, cheese, honey, and spices. Over the years these spiced pies became more and more associated with Christmas due to their luxurious, celebratory nature, baked in large rectangles to represent a crib and sometimes even topped with pastry-based depictions of baby Jesus. By the seventeenth century they started to come in the form of smaller, single-serve circular pies, but the filling was still certainly meat first, spices and sweetness second.
It’s hard to say exactly when these festive pies started to lose their meatiness and become a purely sweet endeavour. In the eighteenth century, recipes started appearing that listed ground pork or beef as an optional inclusion, and as sugar became more readily available in the UK due to imports from colonial plantations in the West Indies, it started to play a more prominent part. By the time Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, mince pies were much like the ones we eat today
Gingerbread Men
According to The Gaurdian.com The tradition of decorated gingerbread houses began in Germany in the early 1800s, supposedly popularised after the not-so-Christmassy fairytale of Hansel and Gretel was published in 1812. The Grimms’ original fairy tale includes the line: “When they came nearer they saw that the house was built of bread, and roofed with cakes, and the window was of transparent sugar.” (In later versions it became gingerbread, rather than just bread.) Inspired by the story, German bakers began to craft small decorated houses from lebkuchen, spiced honey biscuits.
Figure-shaped gingerbread is often credited to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, where biscuits were made in the likeness of important guests. It was even referred to in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598: “And I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldn’t have it to buy gingerbread.” In the following centuries shaped gingerbread became popular across Europe, with figures and models used as window decorations, or given as gifts on religious holidays or birthdays
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