ABSTRACT
The Victorians’ attempt to tell a unified story of the cake and its uses up to their own time was not entirely groundless, for one of our themes must be the way in which established practices suggest new possibilities. There is indeed a kind of evolution here, in which each stage is a starting point from which those coming to it afresh begin. Often they merely reproduce what they have found, but sometimes not. Sometimes circumstances make it impossible; sometimes it becomes for some people undesirable; sometimes a practical advantage in change is identified; and sometimes perhaps the spirit of creative experimentation which humanity at its best can display intervenes for no very clear reason at all. And whenever there is change and ideas of any kind are brought to bear on it they can hardly come from elsewhere than the experience of the people concerned. There is therefore another kind of continuity too, in which old possibilities are recycled in new forms. Though there is no single story of cultural change to be told, and the search for a single theory of cultural change must in the end prove fruitless, there are striking links and patterns always to be found. In this chapter cakebreaking and cake-cutting, the two major lines of development, and the way they have been linked by dreaming will be traced. The two will be seen to spring initially from different kinds of ‘cake’ and to parallel one another in their development. Other ways in which cakes have been used will emerge as the discussion proceeds.
