More on Baby Cakes, later called Twelfth Night Cakes (this time with Beans and Peas)

 

Robert Herrick from the frontispiece of Hesperides 

Today’s focus is the food in the festive poetry of Robert Herrick, who was, as mentioned yesterday, a follower of Ben Jonson and supporter in writ of Royalist hospitality in the seventeenth century. He went to Cambridge, took orders and was a Church of England vicar for much of his adult life. This position was taken from him by the Puritan-leaning Parliament in 1647, after Royal defeats early in the English Civil War. It was restored to him again by Charles II in 1662. Looking for income in the intervening years he published his poetry under the title Hesperides, or, The Works Both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. in 1648. 

The first bit of Herrick’s holiday food we will look at is one found in the Jonson Masque; it requires a slight correction and further explanation. A Baby Cake was one name for little pastry figures representing the Christ Child. However, with further research, the Baby Cake mentioned by the earlier writer was actually more like the King Cake I compared to those. 

The character Babie Cacke in the royalty-presented Christmas, His Masque is accompanied by an usher who bears a great cake. One detail I failed to go into was the fact the cake came with “a beane and a pease.” This is what it most sounds like, the cake had a bean and a pea (both probably of the harder varieties) within it. 

We can use Herrick to explain what Jonson is referring to. Here is a poem from Hesperides, entitled “Twelfe night, or King and Queene:” 

Now, now the mirth comes 

With the cake full of plums, 

Where Beane's the King of the sport here; 

Beside we must know, 

The Pea also 

Must reveal, as Queene, in the Court here. 

Begin then to choose, 

(This night as ye use) 

Who shall for the present delight here, 

Be a King by the lot, 

And who shall not 

Be Twelfth-day Queene for the night here. 

Which known, let us make 

Joy-sops with the cake; 

And let not a man then be seen here, 

Who unurged will not drink 

To the base from the brink 

A health to the King and the Queene here. 

Next crown the bowl full 

With gentle lambs-wool; 

Adde sugar, nutmeg and ginger, 

With store of ale too; 

And thus ye must doe 

To make the wassail a swinger. 

Give then to the King 

And Queene wassailing; 

And though with ale ye be whet here; 

Yet part ye from hence, 

As free from offence, 

As when ye innocent met here. 

The occasion is the Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve (5 January) and there is a cake full of plums (probably actually raisins – more on that soon). The bean and a pea hold special places, they will reveal the King and Queen. It is like the still-current practice of King Cake, where a figure of a baby is baked into the cake and whoever gets the piece that holds it is declared king. In this case, the piece with the bean would “cho[o]se” who would “Be a King by the lot,” ie. lottery, while the piece with the pea “must reveal” the queen. I find an interesting parallel with the Princess and the Pea from Hans Christian Andersen but since that comes from a Scandanavian tradition, the connection would need be very far back, maybe before the English split from those peoples.  

In another of his poems, A New Years Gift, Herrick speaks again of this celebratory quasi-ceremony. His gift is a verse that will speak of the joys the season just passed, he writes: 

Of twelfth-tide cakes, of pease and beans, 

Wherewith ye make those merry scenes, 

Whenas ye chuse your king and queen, 

And cry out, Hey for our town green! 

This tradition was, even then, an old and wide spread one. The later seventeenth century writer Aphra Behn, in her short story, “The Court of the King of Bantam” has characters gather on “the Evening o' Twelfth-day, to renew the famous and ancient Solemnity of Chusing King and Queen.” A passage detailing the night reads: “After Supper...then the mighty Cake, Teeming with the Fate of this Extraordinary Personage was brought in, which was then Cut and Consulted, and the Royal Bean and Pea fell to those to whom Sir Philip had design'd 'em.” Finding a bean in a cake was apparently part of an old saying then; one translator of John Calvin has him say in 1587, “they thought themselves to have found wisdom, like as we commonly say in the Proverb, that a man thinks he hath found the Bean in the Cake.” Calvin was French and the porcelain or now plastic baby in King Cake, or Galette des Rois, in the older French tradition, was once a fava bean. 

A British political carton by Isaac Cruikshank from 1797, showing a later version of a Baby Cake called a Twelfth Night Cake. 

There was more than just cake in Herrick’s “Twelfe Night”, including drinkable Lamb’s Wool, and culinary hospitality makes a number of appearances in his other works. More on those markers of Christmas cheer tomorrow.