There's no such thing as a free cake, pt I ?
Cake making is a hobby of mine that began when I was very young. And it began with making birthday cakes. An early picture of me and my sister shows us helpfully stirring cake batter for a birthday cake for my grandmother. Her birthday was in August and every year we made her a cake. Her favorite was yellow cake with chocolate icing.
The original cake we used to make was simply titled, "yellow layer cake" and it was from a very old and dog-eared book. This cake was very dry although it has a certain buttery and rich taste that I haven't really found replicated anywhere combined with a tender crumb. My mom always said it was expected that you would put a simple syrup (sugar and water combo) onto layer cakes to aid in preservation of moistness.
Of course, that's not really the practice now. Now we have super cake mixes that are so resilient to error that one can make them without the oil or egg, just water and some baking powder and they turn out just fine. Supposedly the first cake mixes were made without anyone having to add anything but water, but they tested poorly in markets because people wanted to feel like they were really making something and that meant they had to add real ingredients. This is because part of the cake making was the act of mixing itself, not merely the appearance of a baked cake.
I happily theorize that the rise of home done cake decorating (of course, the elites have been competing in sugar decorations since forever) is possibly the result of adding the competitive and labor intensive aspect back into what was, due to oven reliability, baking powder, and then cake mixes, an increasingly trivial process. It's just a theory. Of course, if you doubt me, consider this...a high powered middle class wage earner makes, say, 50 bucks an hour, and a cake including decorating, takes 2 or 3 hours. If the person spent what amounts to 2 -3 hours of salary or 150 bucks on a cake, they would get a pretty darn fancy decorated one. However, because it was only labored over indirectly (via their work hours) it is not considered with the same sort of appreciation of the taste or the artistry!
Clearly, we value the act, the labor of making it DIRECTLY in some way...so that the cakes I could MAKE my grandmother for her birthday outweighed, in value, any cake I could buy for her. It's what makes making birthday cakes so special and fun to do. There is value in the act of doing it yourself that isn't just because it "saves money". Our proximity to the cake making process itself makes it "better" in some way. It is somehow more of a "gift" the more it is out of the crass commercial wage earning and speciality production MARKET.
Interesting way to assess value of gifts isn't it? It doesn't work for everything though does it? There are different gifting traditions attached to different items. I mean, you wouldn't expect your fiance to create your engagement ring him or herself would you? But somehow, when it comes to food, "homemade" carries more currency in most situations then "store-bought".
This leads nicely into a tangent about the "gift economy". A famous french sociologist, Marcel Mauss (and nephew to Emile Durkheim) wrote extensively about the social obligations of gift giving in his essay, The Gift. I had to read the 1990 Halls translation of this book for an undergraduate anthropology seminar. The cliff notes version of the book is that Mauss describes systems of gift-giving within different cultural examples as creating networks of obligation and competition. Gift-giving is often antagonistic or intended to control the giftee by creating that sense of public obligation.
There is also a sense of being "marked" that has been explored in more ethnographic details in other works, for example in a class on Hindu culture, a book The Poison in the Gift, describes a complex situation in which gift giving is used to contruct and restate one's place within the castes. At least, that's my cliff notes version! There's something that all of us in the class (Americans all, though from different "ethnicities" and regions) really couldn't completely grasp about the gift giving as marking and property collecting as negative thing.
The instructor, McKim Marriott attempted to teach us by having us play a game (called Samsara, naturally enough) on Saturdays in order to get us more into the "framework". In the game, which was kind of like a Hindu D & D game complete with a DM (Marriott himself) we were supposed to grow crops, exchange gifts and everything else with the goal of getting rid of all our material possessions to achieve "moksha" or release from the cycle. Well...we just kept trying to collect stuff like it was monopoly.
Poor guy was probably very frustrated.
It reminds me of another Anthropology class I had on the NW coast potlatch in which the class simply couldn't see the downside of being gifted with speedboats (some of the modern ones had that) or why you would want to compete in that way. I think I had my first proper demonstration at a large wedding of a friend in which the parents (from an Asian country) kept careful track of all the gifts of their peers (other asian couple doctors) so that they could return the gifts with interest when their kids got married. Fascinating stuff and certainly an interesting way to move capital and prestige around an ethnic community in greater Chicago. They kept up ties through these networks of ritual obligation.
I was reminded of the "poison" in gift exchange recently in regards to birthday cake baking!
Up next in part II, birthday cake as power struggle?
The original cake we used to make was simply titled, "yellow layer cake" and it was from a very old and dog-eared book. This cake was very dry although it has a certain buttery and rich taste that I haven't really found replicated anywhere combined with a tender crumb. My mom always said it was expected that you would put a simple syrup (sugar and water combo) onto layer cakes to aid in preservation of moistness.
Of course, that's not really the practice now. Now we have super cake mixes that are so resilient to error that one can make them without the oil or egg, just water and some baking powder and they turn out just fine. Supposedly the first cake mixes were made without anyone having to add anything but water, but they tested poorly in markets because people wanted to feel like they were really making something and that meant they had to add real ingredients. This is because part of the cake making was the act of mixing itself, not merely the appearance of a baked cake.
I happily theorize that the rise of home done cake decorating (of course, the elites have been competing in sugar decorations since forever) is possibly the result of adding the competitive and labor intensive aspect back into what was, due to oven reliability, baking powder, and then cake mixes, an increasingly trivial process. It's just a theory. Of course, if you doubt me, consider this...a high powered middle class wage earner makes, say, 50 bucks an hour, and a cake including decorating, takes 2 or 3 hours. If the person spent what amounts to 2 -3 hours of salary or 150 bucks on a cake, they would get a pretty darn fancy decorated one. However, because it was only labored over indirectly (via their work hours) it is not considered with the same sort of appreciation of the taste or the artistry!
Clearly, we value the act, the labor of making it DIRECTLY in some way...so that the cakes I could MAKE my grandmother for her birthday outweighed, in value, any cake I could buy for her. It's what makes making birthday cakes so special and fun to do. There is value in the act of doing it yourself that isn't just because it "saves money". Our proximity to the cake making process itself makes it "better" in some way. It is somehow more of a "gift" the more it is out of the crass commercial wage earning and speciality production MARKET.
Interesting way to assess value of gifts isn't it? It doesn't work for everything though does it? There are different gifting traditions attached to different items. I mean, you wouldn't expect your fiance to create your engagement ring him or herself would you? But somehow, when it comes to food, "homemade" carries more currency in most situations then "store-bought".
This leads nicely into a tangent about the "gift economy". A famous french sociologist, Marcel Mauss (and nephew to Emile Durkheim) wrote extensively about the social obligations of gift giving in his essay, The Gift. I had to read the 1990 Halls translation of this book for an undergraduate anthropology seminar. The cliff notes version of the book is that Mauss describes systems of gift-giving within different cultural examples as creating networks of obligation and competition. Gift-giving is often antagonistic or intended to control the giftee by creating that sense of public obligation.
There is also a sense of being "marked" that has been explored in more ethnographic details in other works, for example in a class on Hindu culture, a book The Poison in the Gift, describes a complex situation in which gift giving is used to contruct and restate one's place within the castes. At least, that's my cliff notes version! There's something that all of us in the class (Americans all, though from different "ethnicities" and regions) really couldn't completely grasp about the gift giving as marking and property collecting as negative thing.
The instructor, McKim Marriott attempted to teach us by having us play a game (called Samsara, naturally enough) on Saturdays in order to get us more into the "framework". In the game, which was kind of like a Hindu D & D game complete with a DM (Marriott himself) we were supposed to grow crops, exchange gifts and everything else with the goal of getting rid of all our material possessions to achieve "moksha" or release from the cycle. Well...we just kept trying to collect stuff like it was monopoly.
Poor guy was probably very frustrated.
It reminds me of another Anthropology class I had on the NW coast potlatch in which the class simply couldn't see the downside of being gifted with speedboats (some of the modern ones had that) or why you would want to compete in that way. I think I had my first proper demonstration at a large wedding of a friend in which the parents (from an Asian country) kept careful track of all the gifts of their peers (other asian couple doctors) so that they could return the gifts with interest when their kids got married. Fascinating stuff and certainly an interesting way to move capital and prestige around an ethnic community in greater Chicago. They kept up ties through these networks of ritual obligation.
I was reminded of the "poison" in gift exchange recently in regards to birthday cake baking!
Up next in part II, birthday cake as power struggle?
posted by Pretzel Bender at 2:15 PM
2 Comments:
I didn't know Mauss was Durkheim's nephew; but I guess I shouldn't be surprised as D was related to pretty much everyone somehow. I flicked through your "Poison in the Gift", expecting a rumination on the fact that the word gift in German has the connotations of 'poison'.
But how does this part of your post relate to the first part? I mean, if making someone a cake is essentially an attempt to assert power over them, doesn't that contradict the notion that putting labour into a cake makes it a better gift than buying one? A self-made cake, to the cynical Maussian, is not a nobler gift but only a more efficient means of creating obligation.
PS. Does this mean that I should turn down the offer of a cake this year?
I see I've already given away the punchline for my next blog part two where I elaborate that I disagree with Mauss's dogmatic statement about ALL gifts. I think there are "free" gifts...depending on the context and the relationship.
My grandmother wasn't obligated because the birthday cake was really our tribute to her not something that had to be reciprocated. A subtle distinction but an important one. Those we hold close accept more from us. In some cases they accept everything. Reciprocation is not always in kind among those we love.
And yes, I thought it was hysterically funny that "gift" means "poison" in German and I'm pretty sure the author knew it too!
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