XMAS SPECIAL... Cake in India

Cake in India

If the Brits brought the cake to the subcontinent, American missionaries popularised the baking powder, and war-time rations led to eggless delights. The lip-smacking story of the cake revolution in India

On December 25, 1955, the Times of India (ToI) reported that Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, would cut a special, 40-pound Christmas cake that day: “Slices of the cake and sweets will be distributed among the staff and their children.”

This was a relatively rare mention, at that time, of a cake in a formal context. ToI was, of course, full of advertisements for cakes from well-known Bombay bakers like Bosotto, and tips for making Christmas cake at home. But this was restricted to large cities, or hill stations and towns where the British presence had been strong.

Christmas cakes at least had a traditional presence on the calendar. Other formal cakes, like wedding cakes, were much rarer. Traditional Indian weddings simply weren’t structured to feature a climactic cake-cutting moment. They were seen as too Western for the occasion, and there was also the concern about guests who were strictly vegetarian refusing a cake that might contain eggs. Cakes were for children’s birthday parties or events like office celebrations, where they were usually bought from bakeries.

But this is changing, as Farzana Currimbhoy’s experience in Chennai shows. Currimbhoy’s is a familiar name in the city for selling crockery and glassware, but when she decided to add baking products to one of her outlets, it was out of personal interest. “I have always liked baking, but it was often hard to find the equipment and ingredients for it,” she says.

She thought she could cater to a few others with a similar interest. In fact, Passionate Baking, as the division was called, was able to tap into a rapidly increasing interest in home baking — and from a changing customer base. “It’s not just women who want to bake now. Many men are really interested in baking,” says Currimbhoy.

People are willing to take the challenge of making increasingly complicated cakes, even those usually left to professional bakers. “We are selling lots of tiers and figures to top the cakes for people who want to make their wedding cakes at home,” she says. And December now sees even more demand from the Christmas cakes market. “I know a family who has taken a week off just to make Christmas cakes in the old way, everyone doing it together,” says Currimbhoy.

An even more dramatic sign of the cake boom was provided by Cakeology, a baking trade show that had its second event in Mumbai in September this year. Cakeology was started by Khushi Malani and Farzana Gandhi, who had noted the increasing interest in home baking and felt the time was ripe for a show focused on it. “The interest in the event has grown tremendously over the past year. There was a 30-35% increase in both exhibitor as well as visitor footfall,” says Gandhi.

Companies sold cooking chocolate and fruit pastes for macaroons alongside others demonstrating ovens and mixers. Visitors eagerly reached for free samples of food colours in vivid shades, and signed up for classes in making sugar flowers and other elaborate edible decorations. Muffin pre-mixes were sold alongside cake moulds in fanciful shapes and chemical additives for professional bakers.

But the centre of attention at the show was a gigantic cake in the life-size shape of an Indian bride in a flowing lehnga and groom in ornate kurta and turban. Forget bride and groom choosing a wedding cake — here they were the cake, in a prospect of symbolic celebratory cannibalism which had visitors queuing up to take selfies with it.

Sweets Beginnings

If it has taken us some time to get here, it is because cake-making faced challenges in India. The British brought the concept, but struggled with the components. David Burton in The Raj at Tablelisted the problems: “Primitive ovens and the rarity of fine flour, properly washed butter which was free of buttermilk, and yeast.” Yeast was needed since home-baked cakes were essentially sweet breads until the mid-19th century when baking powder was invented.

Separated eggs, with the whites beaten to a stiff froth, were the other way to add lightness, but this was laborious and good eggs weren’t always in easy supply. It’s no surprise then that while Mrs J Bartley in her Indian Cookery General cookbook gives a recipe for “A Delicious Cake” using separated eggs, she also has a Toddy Cake where the fast-fermenting liquid did the lifting work.

Using baking powder for cakes was popularised in the US, and one of the first Indian cookbooks with a really large selection on cakes is the Landour Community Cookbook, made up of recipes collected by American missionaries in their Indian headquarters at the hill station near Mussoorie. Hill stations were also known for their milk products, including the butter needed for good cakes.

The big problem was reliable ovens. Few homes had them, but ingenious contraptions were made from metal boxes or large pipes cut to size that could be sealed and placed on a tray of sand made glowing hot with coals, and more coals placed on top. This was hard to open while in use, so checking on cakes was difficult, but some bakers became expert at it. Writing in ToI in 1999, Maria Athaide wrote of her aunt who still insisted baking this way because “I suspect [she] has an alarm clock embedded somewhere

 inside her.”

Root of the Fruitcake

Burton says fruitcakes became popular as “memsahibs took advantage of local fruits and spices to make tea-time favourites”. This is where particularly Indian ingredients started entering the cakes, like petha, candied ash-gourd that is the speciality of places like Agra and Ajmer. This is a key ingredient in many old Indian Christmas cake recipes.

Fruitcakes were expected to be dense and heavy with ingredients, so the problems of getting it to rise were less. And were also practical to keep because they were packed with preserved fruits so these didn’t go stale and, in fact, generally improved over time, especially when regularly soaked in alcohol to help preserve and keep it moist. Rum cake has become a synonym for Christmas fruitcakes.

Most important of all, because fruitcakes were less fragile than other types of cakes, they could be mixed and sent out in pans to the local baker to make in his ovens once he was done with making bread, neatly dispensing with the home oven problem. The practice is dying, but a few home bakers still swear by this for their Christmas cakes, insisting that the old, wood fired ovens give their cakes a special flavour.

Some Indian bakers even sent fruitcakes to Britain. In Kate Chisholm’s essay “Best Bakery in Town”, printed in The Last Bungalow, an anthology about Allahabad, she traces the history of Barnetts, a bakery set up by her family. Barnetts did well in supplying the British in Allahabad and travellers through the city, but when World War II happened, it tried to expand to supplying to Britain which was under strict food rationing.

Chisholm details the special food packages that Barnetts put together, with names like the “Winston”, the “Empire” and “India”, “which cost twenty-one rupees and included a three-pound iced fruitcake, one pound of crystallised fruits, one pound of toffees and hardbakes and fifty cigarettes”. Later on, as Independence approached, Barnetts would try to adapt by renaming the “Empire” as the “Dominion”, but ultimately it closed down.

Far more successful were the bakeries set up in the big cities of the Raj by professional cake makers from Europe. They were mostly from Italy and Switzerland, both places that had developed substantial cultures of patisserie and fancy baking to cater to their large tourist trade. In 1927, for example, a Swiss couple, Joseph and Freida Flury, set up the cake shop named after them in Calcutta.

Flury’s became known both for the cakes it provided in its café and the elaborate concoctions it made on demand. Bachi Karkaria, in her book, Flury’s of Calcutta: The Cake That Walked, recorded one made for a Lucknow nawab that was almost 60 kilos in weight and 35 square feet in size. When it was taken by van it had to be wrapped in multiple protective layers: “When the van slowly drove out of the gates, people thought there had been an accident in the factory, and that a shrouded body was being taken away.”

Dessert Politics

It was monumental creations like this that helped popularise cakes in India. Politicians realised that cakes, which could be easily shaped and coloured as desired, could be used to make symbolic statements or carry actual messages in ways that Indian sweets never could. Sharad Pawar was one of the first to do this, with his 61st birthday in 2001 being celebrated with a 61-ft-long cake that weighed 610 kilos. ToI reported that, in keeping with his rural strongman image, “the cake had decorative toppings displaying scenes of from the rural hinterlands where women were shown carrying water-pots, a farmer ferrying a bullock cart, lush fields and a sugar factory”. Cutting it allowed for even more camera opportunities and, like prashad, it gave something for all his followers to eat.

Other politicians joined in. In 2008 when Mayawati was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, her 52nd birthday was celebrated with a white chocolate cake with the message “Behenji ke 52 janmdivas par hardik badhaiyan.” Her followers and top bureaucrats queued up for pieces. Lalu Prasad Yadav had train-shaped cakes during his stint as railway minister.

Recently, after the BJP’s victory in Gujarat, a leader in Delhi produced a cake decorated with mushroom images to mock the allegation made in the campaign that PM Narendra Modi ate expensive imported mushrooms. But the PM’s most impressive cake moment came last year when a Surat baker made a seven-foot-tall, 3,750-kilo cake to celebrate his 66th birthday, setting a Guinness World Record.

Eggless Evolution

In 2003, BJP politician Uma Bharti caused a controversy by offering a cake at a Hanuman temple, which led to allegations of desecration because the cake might have used eggs. Bharti insisted that the cake was eggless, and the incident was a reminder of the one image problem cakes still faced. The PM’s birthday cake was, of course, eggless and the creation of such recipes has powered Indian cakes.

This may also have American roots. In Span, a magazine produced by the US embassy in India, Jo McGowan, an American married to an Indian, once wrote about making cakes for her strictly vegetarian in-laws. From an American friend she found a recipe dating back to World War II when eggs were scarce and alternatives were devised using baking powder and sour milk. Indian versions started by using dahi, then diversified into ingenious solutions using khoya, flaxseeds, guar gum and other stabilisers.

Currimbhoy says such recipes have helped drive the cake-making market: “Many of our customers in Chennai are Brahmins who are vegetarian, but are interested in baking.” Eggless cakes often compensate for the lack of lightness in texture by piling on toppings, and this has increased interest in elaborate decorations.

And this, of course, ties in with the most compelling advantage of cakes — how well they work in an image-driven, Instagram-addicted age. At a time when we feel we must document and post whatever we cook and eat, cakes provide the best images of all. In the past, home bakers might have balked at putting in a lot of effort for something that would soon be eaten and disappear. But now a cake can live on in a YouTube video or on Instagram, and its disappearance becomes a challenge to even greater effort.

This might explain the emphasis that events like Cakeology put on the appearance of cakes, and why people are willing to invest in the considerable amount of equipment cake-making can need. In the past the problems of storing all this specialised equipment was always a disincentive to home baking.

But now Farzana Gandhi says, “You would be surprised to know that most of them now have their own cake studios or a rented additional space to run their cake business.” They are already planning the third edition of the event for October 2018, and this time with even more training programmes: Face Anatomy, Sculpted Chocolate Cakes, Bean Paste Flowers.... Edible brides and grooms may soon become commonplace, as India continues to eat up the Cake Revolution.

Vikram Doctor

ETM24DEC17