A Passion for Cake

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this series of four programmes broadcast over Christmas, Sheila Dillon explores the link between tradition and food.

First, in the run-up to Christmas, she takes an irreverent look at baking - and the connection between baking and being a "Good Wife and Mother. She begins by visiting a "Clandestine Cake Club", which meets every month in a secret location. This month's location takes the theme of the Mad Hatter's tea-party; the members have risen to the challenge and the cakes are truly extravagant. The founder of the cake club, Lynne Hill, sets out her vision for a world brought together by sharing cake. Sheila visits a cake-decorating competition for teenagers, and talks to girls about the particularly feminine lure of cake. She meets a cultural historian of cake, Professor Nicola Humble, whose book on cake traces our current passion back to Elizabethan days, and who explains the long connection between women and cake. But we also have a perspective from a man devoted to cake, former Bake-Off winner John Whaite. He reflects on the connection between gender and cake, and introduces his alternative take on Christmas Cake.

With cake recipes, both ancient and modern, for the website.

Producer: Elizabeth Burke.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:04.0	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:09.0	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it.
0:15.0	Here I am today making a cake. I don't very often make cakes. And an odd thing is that making a cake makes makes me feel like an earth mother that I'm just dispensing goodness and connection.
0:38.0	But there's nothing in all the savory dishes I make that gives me this feeling that somehow I am dispensing goodness
0:46.4	I am connecting people back to their roots or the earth it's sort of ridiculous idea that just mixing up this sweet
0:56.0	confection and slicing it up and handing it round gives one this marvelous feeling.
1:01.2	In fact when I describe it I don't know why I don't make cakes more often.
1:04.4	What's clear is that in having these feelings I am not alone. I mean the enormous and much
1:11.0	remarked upon success of the Great British Bake-off which now has audiences of almost 15 million.
1:18.0	I mean estimates of the value of the baking market, cake tins and all the rest of the ever growing paraphernalia are nearly 2 billion
1:27.2	pounds it is an extraordinary thing The country is baking.
1:33.0	Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme,
1:35.0	give me, give me, give me, it tastes a good,
1:38.0	no poups it all around.
1:40.0	Today's food programme is about why we bake and it turns out to be part of a long
1:46.0	tradition. So in search of the meaning, the cultural history of cake, I'm going
1:52.3	to a meeting of the clandestine cake club
1:55.9	which is being held in a secret location. It turns out to be sorry.
2:05.0	The theme of tonight's meeting is the Mad Hatters Tea Party.
2:10.0	The setting is an elegant 18th century house decorated with bunting and balloons,
2:15.6	the table scattered with playing cards, just like Tenials, original drawings.
	...

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