Hi there!
Welcome to the festive edition of the History Edit!
By the time you get this in your inboxes the big day will have passed, the Christmas chocolates will be getting low, and the wine will need re-stocking pre-New Years Eve. So before you get your sequins on for a New Year celebration, settle down for a gentle but interesting read and a cup of tea.
At Revell HQ we have done the feasting and drinking part of the season plenty of justice, and our boys have been running around high on sugar and presents like excited little pinballs.
In France it is traditional to have a seafood feast on Christmas Eve, and our local restaurant did not disappoint with their offerings for the takeaway we purchased. All manner of edible goodies from the stormy winter seas were nestled on a bed of ice and seaweed inside a boat. Fancy!
Our New Year’s celebrations will be spent at home playing a deadly serious game of Risk with plenty more treats washed down with champagne.
Happy New Year to you all!
Twelfth Night Cake
This year I diligently made my Christmas cake sometime in October so it could have weeks of luxuriously bathing in fine scotch whisky, before being draped in its Christmas finery of marzipan and icing. It’s inner glory of plump fruits was revealed on Boxing Day and it is disappearing like the minutes on a clock. Below are this year’s efforts (my three year old directed the decorations).
Christmas cake has a long history in the British Isles and has evolved from the Twelfth Night cake.
Twelve Days
For centuries, British people celebrated the full twelve days of Christmas rather than the usual Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Eve. The twelve days of celebrations would culminate in a huge party of feasting, merriment, and mayhem otherwise known as Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is the eve of Epiphany, which in the Christian calendar celebrates the three Magi visiting the baby Jesus.
One of the focal points of the delicious treats available during this celebration was the Twelfth Night cake. The rich cake was filled with brandy soaked fruits amongst many other good things to eat, and was then coated with a hard cocoon of white icing.
The cake would also have a hard bean or pea baked within and whoever discovered the errant pulse when devouring their slice would become the king or queen for the day. In the royal household of Henry VIII, whoever found the bean or pea became the Lord of Misrule. This could have been a servant, as it was one of the very few times different strata of the household could mix on an equal footing.
The fading of misrule and merriment
From the Reformation onwards, Twelfth Night celebrations and traditions began to very slowly wane, with the cake being one of the last to go in the more staid Victorian era, when it was replaced by Christmas Cake. The act of placing a charm or coin also continued in the Christmas Pudding. Although interestingly, in France the Galette de Rois (King Cake) still contains a charm, with the lucky recipient winning the gold paper crown that is often contained in the packaging with the almond paste filled pastry. This is also eaten to celebrate epiphany.
Medieval and Early Modern Twelfth Night Cakes were more like leavened breads studded with the delicious fruits and familiar festive spices that still waft down the centuries, tempting our tastebuds. As the art of cookery evolved over the centuries, with inventions and discoveries such as cake hoops and using eggs to raise, the more modern dense cake emerged.
So wether you celebrate Yule, Saturnalia, or Christmas you can safely celebrate it with an unctuous fruit cake or two.
Here is a recipe for Twelfth Night Cake from the National Trust.
Here is an older yeast-leavened style recipe from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Monthly Edit
Christmas cracker facts
I’ve spent the festive period in other countries and it seems that, alongside my beloved Christmas cake and mince pies, crackers are only really popular in the UK.
In the Victorian era a confectioner by the name of Tom Smith invented the original cracker and called them ‘Bangs of Expectation”.
Smith had been inspired by confectionary wrapped in pretty twists of paper on a visit to Paris and brought the trend back to Britain. Initially they weren’t popular but he soon came up with the idea of making them more exciting by adding a riddle and a snap. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bonus fact: The longest Christmas cracker on record is one made by the pupils and parents of a Buckinghamshire school in 2001. The cracker measured a whopping 207ft in length and 13ft in diameter.
My favourite cracker joke:
Q - What is Good King Wenceslas’ favourite pizza?
A - Deep pan, crisp and even!
You’re welcome! 😂
Richard III innocent?
A new find by the team responsible for finding the ill-fated monarch in the car park, according to this article in the The Telegraph, may exonerate him from any evil deeds.
The researchers claim to have found potential evidence in a church in rural Devon that they say means the older of the two Princes in the Tower may have survived.
WWII memories
Back in 2003, the BBC began a project aimed at gathering the public memories of WWII before these were lost to the inevitable march of time. The results of the project means that over 47,000 stories and 15,000 images were saved for future generations to learn from.
A huge array of subjects are covered, including air raids, rationing, and conscientious objectors. This treasure trove of memories from the everyday people who experienced it is such a poignant and vital read. It steps away from the big history and takes you into the world of our grandparents and shows you exactly how lucky we are today.
Dinner party wisdom
If you’re planning a dinner party to celebrate the New Year, then this article in Vogue is a little bit of you! It’s a deliciously witty piece.
The Duchess of Windsor (Wallis Simpson), probably one of the most controversial but clever and incredibly stylish women of the last century, wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide to entertaining for Vogue in 1949.
Top tips include picking controversial subjects to keep conversation lively, serving dinner after 8:45pm, as that’s when women over 40 will look their best, and never letting a French chef have artistic license with the evening menu.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this festive edition of the newsletter and that you’ve all had jolly times with people you love this Yuletide season. Happy New Year to you all! 🍾
See you soon!
Jade x
Ps As ever, you can always contact me on here or find me on Instagram.