Food and its preparation, in particular of so complex an item as a wedding cake, is particularly instructive and vividly illustrates the tradition and traditional values inherent in all foods. At once familiar in form, tradition, and ceremony, it represents a fascination and a range of problems with which anthropologists are only just beginning to work.
The wedding cake is a product of a complex, contingent, and continuing history, which illustrates and challenges theories of "structuralism" and "neo-structuralism." In Wedding Cakes and Cultural History, this fascinating history becomes the basis for a discussion of how use and meaning are involved in the creation of cultural forms. The wedding cake has evolved on a time scale which can readily be encompassed in research and in ways that have been minutely charted in a wealth of successive recipes recorded from the late medieval period and set in Europe, America, and world contexts. In this field at leas |
