There are three stories of the origin of Simnel Cake. The first alleges that the name comes from “similia”, Latin for the fine flour from which the cake was originally made; this story is both plausible and dull. The second, more exciting, claims it was invented by Lambert Simnel, a fifteenth-century ten-year-old who impersonated the Earl of Warwick (also age ten), was crowned King Edward VI in Dublin, fought against Henry VII, and was later - aged eleven by this time - pardoned and given a job in the royal kitchen as a spit-turner. Better.
The final story of the origin of the Simnel Cake comes from an old woman from Salop, who was told the story as a child:
An old Shropshire tale has it that long ago there lived an honest old couple, Simon and Nelly, and it was their custom to gather their children around them at Easter. Nelly had some leftover unleavened dough from Lent, and Simon reminded her there was some plum pudding still left over from Christmas. They could make some treats for the visiting family.
Nell put the leftovers together, and Sim insisted the cake should be boiled, while she was just as certain that it should be baked. They had a fight and came to blows, but compromised by doing both. They cooked the cake over a fire made from furniture broken in the scuffle, and some eggs, similarly broken, were used to baste it. The delicacy was named after this cantankerous couple.
I’m very fond of stories about how particular food came to be. I recently left some balsamic vinegar to reduce on the stove and forgot about it, and found it a couple of hours later reduced to a black sponge with the texture of brittle plastic. Since I’d read a lot of stories about food origins, I took a bite, assuming it would be delicious and that in a few months I could languidly tell reporters the story of how I discovered BalsamiSnax and became a millionaire. The fact that it tasted horrible is no reason why some other unlikely concatenations of food mightn’t turn out delicious, and any food origin that involves a married couple hitting each other with stools until they break and then using those stools to bake their new cake is a story it would be churlish to disbelieve.
These days, the qualifications for a simnel cake are a bit less stringent than they used to be: stool-smashing is optional, and there’s no boiling required, for a start. Other people’s simnel cakes seem to establish a simple but clear set of rules:
1. The cake must be made on, or for, Mothering Sunday (the 18th of March, this year) or Easter Sunday.
2. It must be a fruit cake.
4. There must be a layer of marzipan inside.
3. There must be another layer of marzipan on top.
5. There must be eleven marzipan balls on top of that, representing the Apostles, except for Judas who, as punishment for betraying Christ, was denied the right to be represented in confectionery form.
6. There must be some other endearing but slightly silly decoration on top, which should be related to Easter and rebirth in some way.
Unfortunately, I don’t like marzipan (presumably it was invented when Zeppo Marx fell into a giant pan of almonds just after he’d been for a swim in a pool that was unexpectedly filled with sugar, at which he was so angry that he broke eggs all over himself and rolled around until he was covered in a thick white paste; it certainly tastes like it).
I’m also not really very enthusiastic about fruit cake (except in the very broad sense that, say, an orange cake or a bar of chocolate with sultanas in it is a fruit cake).
Also, I realised it was Simnel Cake Day at four-thirty on Mothering Sunday, half an hour before the local supermarket closed, and one of my housemates — the one who told me about Simnel Cake in the first place — is gluten-intolerant. Fortunately I had already chosen to discount the “similia” fine-flour origin story.
