Alysa Levene

If you have wondered about the stories behind the cakes made on the Great British Bake Off or the difference between a Victoria sandwich and a sponge cake (especially if Mary Berry or Nigella Lawson is not to hand), this is the book for you. Baking has always been about memories passed down through families and Alysa Levene will take you through this compelling social history of baking. 'My sister had three wedding cakes. Rather than spend a lot of money on a traditional cake she asked our grandmother, our mother, and our step-mother to make their signature bakes. My grandmother made the rich fruit cake she always baked at Christmas. My mother made a chocolate sponge which we called Queenie's Chocolate Cake after the great aunt who gave her the recipe; it appeared at almost every one of our birthdays in one guise or another. And finally, my step-mother made chocolate brownies (Nigella Lawson's recipe, if you'd like to know), whose sticky, pleasurable unctuousness is fully explained by the amount of butter they contain. 'In our family, as in many others, these familiar cakes are the makers of memories. My siblings and I took this idea into our adult lives, and now bake for our own families. But it wasn't until I developed an interest in the history of food that I started to think about the deeper significance of these tasty treats. What does cake mean for different people? How have we come to have such a huge variety of cakes? What had to happen historically for them to appear? And what can they tell us about the family, and women's roles in particular? I wrote this book to find out the answers.' What follows is a journey from King Alfred to our modern-day love of cupcakes, via Queen Victoria's patriotic sandwich, the Southern States of America, slavery and the spice trade, to the rise of the celebrity chef . . . and so much more.

Cake: A Slice of History

Cake can evoke thoughts of home, comfort someone at a time of grief or celebrate a birth or new love. It is a maker of memories, a marker of identities, and delicious! It was the year 878 A.D., and a man claims sanctuary in a small village home in Wessex. To the surprise of the villager, the man is not a passing vagabond but Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons. The village homemaker is happy to hide him from the marauding Danes, provided he keeps an eye on the cake she has baking in the oven. Preoccupied with how to re-take his kingdom, Alfred lets the cakes burn, and the incident passed in to folklore forever. From these seemingly ignoble beginnings, not only was Alfred able to reclaim his spot in history, but the humble villagers' cake has ascended in world culture as well. Alysa Levene looks at cakes both ancient and modern, from the Fruit Cake, to the Pound Cake, from the ubiquitous birthday cake to the Angel Food Cake, all the way up to competitive baking shows on television and our modern obsession with macaroons and cup cakes. Along the way, author Alysa Levene shows how cakes are so much more than just a delicious sugar hit, and reflects on how and why cakes became the food to eat in times of celebration. Cake reflects cultural differences, whether it is the changing role of women in the home, the expansion of global trade, even advances in technology. Entertaining and delightfully informative, Cake: A Slice of History promises to be a witty and joyous celebration of our cultural heritage.

Cake

Martin Powell

The book examines, for the first time in any detail or in any depth, the provision of municipal medicine in interwar England and Wales at both national and local case-study levels. Municipal health care was an important, but historically neglected, part of the British health care system in this period. The book presents conceptual and empirical perspectives on interwar municipal medicine in England. Using a mixture of under-utilised quantitative and archival data, it explores the patterns of local authority medical services at both national and local levels.&ltBR> What emerges is a complex pattern of provision which touched on all areas of healthcare from the 'cradle to the grave', but with very different priorities and forms in different places. In turn, this raises important questions about the role of local government in this period before the advent of the National Health Service and thereby the subsequent history of health care in England.

Municipal Medicine in Interwar England and Wales

Cradle to Grave

This book is a thorough and engaging examination of an institution and its young charges, set in the wider social, cultural, demographic and medical context of the eighteenth century. By examining the often short lives of abandoned babies, the book illustrates the variety of pathways to health, ill-health and death taken by the young and how it intersected with local epidemiology, institutional life and experiences of abandonment, feeding and child-care. For the first time, the characteristics of the babies abandoned to the London Foundling Hospital have been examined, highlighting the reasons parents and guardians had for giving up their charges. Clearly presented statistical analysis shows how these characteristics interacted with poverty and welfare to influence heath and survivorship across infancy and early childhood. The book builds up sources from Foundling Hospital records, medical tracts and parish registers to illustrate how the hospital managed the care of its children, and how it reflected wider medical ideas on feeding and child health. Child fostering, paid nursing and family formation in different parts of England are also examined, showing how this metropolitan institution called on a network of contacts to try to raise its charges to good health. This book will be of considerable significance to scholars working in economic and social history, medical and institutional history and histories of childhood and childcare in the early modern period. It will also be of interest to anthropologists interested in child-rearing and feeding practices, and inter-family relationships

Alysa Levene

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