Cakes and Characters: An English Christmas Tradition

by Bridget Ann Henisch

Hardback book with dust jacket titled CAKES AND English Christmas Tradition.

236 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1984

Reviews

[Kara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book examines the rise and decline of a few specific Christmas traditions. The background is interesting – all the pagan and Christian stuff getting mixed and baked – but the author missed a real chance to dig into the equally interesting aspect of how changing from an agricultural to industrial world completely changed a major day on the calendar.

[Rebecca]

This was quite a dense book about a topic I knew very little about but which I read because it was 1) about cakes and 2) contained this magnificent sentence: “An endless fusillade of remonstrances and restrictions crackled from indignant pens”.
I would have appreciated a timeline of all the events in this book and I got a bit muddled. She assumes many people to be common knowledge but what is common knowledge to an English scholar in 1978 is different from an American lay person (however well read) in 2010.
Still it was fun to read a random research book. I would like to go back and time and increase contrast and darkness on some of the illustrative pictures.