Coventry God Cakes: the sweet treat “peculiar to that place”
Godcakes baked by Leigh Waite - Heritage Bakehouse and Daniel Gettings - PhD Research
Coventry God Cakes: the sweet treat “peculiar to that place”[1]
“They were triangular in shape, an inch in thickness, and contained a kind of mincemeat. So general was their use at the New Year that the cheaper sorts were hawked about the streets, like hot-cross-buns of Good Friday.”[1]
From Bakewell tarts to Eccles cakes, the United Kingdom is home to hundreds if not thousands of traditional sweet foods each enclosed in their own individual histories and traditions. Some have doubtless been lost to time, perhaps never to be rediscovered. Some, like the aforementioned Bakewell tart, are household names and are recognisable far beyond the Derbyshire dales where the Bakewell pudding first emerged, centuries ago. The God Cake, however, occupies an unusual space in this weird world of local puddings. Before we explore this however, many may be asking, what is a God Cake?
God Cakes are a festive, traditional, sweet food associated with Warwickshire, Coventry specifically. Despite the name, they are actually a type of pastry that, as the previous quote from an article on old English New Year traditions eloquently describes, take the form of triangles of puff pastry filled with mincemeat. These triangles were, according to tradition, given by God parents to God children on New Year’s Day in the city, as a tasty physical present to accompany a spiritual blessing for the year ahead.
What makes God Cakes unusual? Unlike so many other similar local dishes which either stand the test of time or fade away into obscurity, the God Cake appears to be the subject of a constant process of rediscovery. To elaborate, let us turn perhaps the most famous recipe book to include them, Good Things in England – A Practical Cookery Book for Everyday Use by Florence White. The book was initially written in 1932 by Florence White, a cookery writer, and the founder of the English Folk Cookery Association.[2] Providing both a recipe, and a few sentences on the traditions of the God Cake, the books significance is not the depth of its information (which is relatively sparse) or its age (there are earlier works that mention the dish) but its longevity as a print work. Good Things in England is still available today having been through at least three reprints in the interim and has been cited by the founder of the Heritage bakery (one of the chief sources of God Cakes in Coventry today) as an inspiration.[3] This demonstrates the process through which the God Cake has been sustained as a traditional food for the last two hundred years. Various local histories and folk cookbooks have served to ‘rediscover’ the pastry and in so doing, have informed a new audience of its existence. From nineteenth century histories like Mary Harris Dormer’s Life in an Old English Town to Florence White in the 1930’s, The Country Guide of the 1950’s and The Folklore of Warwickshire in the 1970’s, the God Cake has never been allowed to disappear from public knowledge, allowing the people of Coventry multiple renaissances for their sweet treat.[4]
The God Cake is also unusual in that its age is so hard to pin down. While numerous works have served to keep the God Cake within the local consciousness, relatively little is known of its history and traditions beyond a few elements which these works are broadly agreed upon. The first has already been mentioned; that they served as a gift given by God parents upon the New Year and this practice apparently provides the sweets with their name. The second is that the triangular shape is meant to represent the Trinity. Beyond these two elements and the fact that the dish contains “mincemeat”, the God Cake has far less concrete fact backing it up that say, the Eccles Cake.
With what we do know though, there is certainly reason to suggest the God Cake might be considerably older than the nineteenth century which is the point to which it is easily traceable. The concept of gifting of God Cakes fits within the paradigm of early modern gifting more generally in which gifts were important symbols of the state of a relationship between two people. This was most significant when attempting to build a relationship either romantically or professionally via patronage but was also important to demonstrate the continued closeness of a bond.[5] Additionally, New Year’s gifts of various kinds can be dated to the Roman conquest, at least in England.[6] Gifted objects range from those we might now think very unusual like pins, to small sums of money (of which a modern analogue can be observed in Chinese New Year and the gifting of red envelopes) so it is certainly conceivable that the God Cake could have served as a present for the New Year from God Parent to God Child.[7]
The shape of the cakes being linked to the Trinity also fits within the practices of medieval Catholicism, particularly symbolism. Symbols were considered a potent source of protection before the Reformation, and historians have noted a plethora of popular rituals that utilised the sign of the cross or the repetition of prayers three times to align with the Trinity or five times to align with the five wounds of Christ which users felt made them more effective.[8] As such, it would make sense that the three sides of the God Cake represented the Trinity given it was designed to accompany a blessing. It is not unreasonable to suggest that medieval Catholics would have felt the shape was lucky and would reinforce the blessings’ chance of working.
As a final note on age, there have been some translations of The Canterbury Tales (written in the late 14th century) in which “God Cake” features. More recent work however tends to translate the same words as “God’s Kichel”.[9] This is still interesting however, as a God’s Kichel or Kitchel is a traditional pastry from Suffolk. Turning to Good Things in England we see that a God’s Kitchel is also a pastry with a fruit filling and was also given to God children receiving their God parent’s blessing and are also triangular in shape.[10] Such a large number of similarities between the traditional baked goods of two regions that would have been almost isolated from one another for much of English history is unusual. Perhaps there was a time where many places had a similar tradition, and it has faded from the records in all but a few locations? Or perhaps a group of migrants from one area to the other carried a traditional sweet across the country? We may never know. However, the mention of a dish so similar to the God Cake in a work as old as the Canterbury Tales in combination with how much their associated traditions fit with medieval and early modern practices certainly implies that these “peculiar” pastries could have an extensive past.
To bake your own triangular sweet treat, try this recipe for Coventry Godcakes
Get involved in our Feast Festival - Food for the Soul - a series of festive food events and fairs
Daniel Gettings - PhD Researcher, University of Warwick
Daniel Gettings is a second year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. He received a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in early modern history also from the University of Warwick. His current research is focused on the relationship between water and daily life in early modern England.
END NOTES:
[1] John R. Fryer, ‘The Old English “New Year”’, The Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. 36, Iss. 1 (1907) pg. 15. [2] Brigid Allen, ‘”White, Florence, Louisa (1863-1940)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) < https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-50486?rskey=2LdQXt&result=3> accessed 29th October 2021 [3] Mary Griffin, ‘God-ly treats that deserve a big revival’, BusinessLive (2014) < https://www.business-live.co.uk/retail-consumer/leigh-waite-women-behind-revival-6941331> accessed 29th October 2021 [4] Mary Harris Dormer, Life in an old English town; a history of Coventry from the earliest times (London: Sonnenschein & co., 1898) pg. 103; White, Good Things in England (1932) pg. 98; Amy J. Roe, ‘Red Christmas Bell’ in The Country guide, Vol. 75 (Dec. 1956) pg. 33; Roy Palmer, The folklore of Warwickshire (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976) pg. 69. [5] On courtship gifts see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and death: ritual, religion and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp. 263-6; On the complex relationship between gifting and patronage, see Richard A. McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte’: Poetry, Patronage and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) particularly chapter 4, pp. 58-70. [6] Fryer, ‘The Old English “New Year”’ (1907) pp. 11-12 [7] Ibid on Pin and Money gifting. [8] See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) pg. 345; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, Scribner, 1971) pg. 515. [9] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems ed. D. Lang Purves (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2014) pg. 293. “A Godde’s kichel”. [10] also triangular in shape.[1] Such a large number of similarities between the traditional baked goods of two regions that would have been almost isolated from one another for much of English history is unusual. Perhaps there was a time where many places had a similar tradition, and it has faded from the records in all but a few locations? Or perhaps a group of migrants from one area to the other carried a traditional sweet across the country? We may never know. However, the mention of a dish so similar to the God Cake in a work as old as the Canterbury Tales in combination with how much their associated traditions fit with medieval and early modern practices certainly implies that these “peculiar” pastries could have an extensive past. [1] White, Good Things in England (1932) pg. 98