NEW BRIDE CAKES

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 120, 16 November 1929, Page 23

NEW BRIDE CAKES

A CAVE AGE CUSTOM

Wedding cakes designed as country churches, for country brides, and cakes modelled as St. Paul's, the Tower, and other historic buildings, for town brides, are among the new bride's cake fashions, writes Elsie Winter in the London "Daily T&legraph." Many young brides will no doubt be delighted at this seemingly bright idea of some enterprising cake designer; but a student of love-lore might rightly say that these new wedding cakes, reflecting the vogue of onr times, are but the inevitable outcome of the bridal-cake romance which really links the young bride of to-day with those fierce young woad-stained maidens who lived in caves in the times of our beetle-browed ancestors.

Of all our wedding customs, none holds such thrill "and mystery, such "lore

of love and .motherhood, as that of the bridal cake. It began far back beyond the dawn of all we know of women. As cakes, these new cake models of rural churches and St. Paul's can be traced back to the we.dding festivities of early English brides, who carried ears of wheat to their weddings, eating some themselves and scattering some of the grain amongst their friends, much as brides to-day distribute their wedding cake. ■ As fashion matured, the simple grain, became ground into flour. It was baked into thin biscuits. Later, new fashion ordained that spices, eggs, and milk be added. The. wheat grain became the bun which, as late as the 17th century, graced the wedding table. This, in turn, grew into our'old-fash-ioned iced, fruit wedding cake, now again ousted by to-day's new models. But, though the wheat grain has become an ornate model of St. Paul's, yet its new form still links us with the day when the great mystery of love and life first dawned in man's awed mind. It is in the strange superstitions of primitive man that the idea of what we know as the wedding cake first took marvellous shape. FIRST "WEDDING CAKES." To primitive man.the most wonderful thing in the world was the wonder of new life. For the mystery of motherhood, he could only account by thinking it great magic bestowed on womenkind by awesome _ life-creating gods. When he married he strove, as savages do to this day, to persuade the gods to bestow on his bride this greatest gift of all. Savages marry at set times of the year, usually at harvest time. Then, in teeming crops and prolific herds, the life-magic of the gods is most evident. It is then that the savage invokes his gods to bestow life-making magic on his bride. The gods are offered a sacifice. They imbue the sacrifice with their great magic; and then the savage worshippers, eating part of the sacrificial offering, believe themselves endowed with the gods' life-making powers. These sacrificial offerings to strange gods were the world's first "wedding cakes." They are found in a thousand guises; sometimes as cannibalistic feasts. The Pawnees of America sacrified a maiden and devoured her heart; the Ghonds of India sacrificed youths until British- rule.; suppressed such rites. Most savage tribe* to-day sacrifice:cows, sheep, goats, or fowls, or offer up grain, in token to the fertility gods. It is a long hark-back from to-day's wedding-cake models to such pagan customs. Time has dimmed the mystery of the age-old superstition; but the wedding cake survives, symbol of a blessing for the bride, of the gift of the greatest magic in the world, the magic ,of life-making.