Acadian seigneur wanted his King Cake

January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, is the official end of the Christmas season, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up our festivities; it is also the beginning of Carnival, the season leading up to Mardi Gras. Even more importantly for those of us who are not overly worried about girth or diet, it is the official start of the King Cake season, when it is downright rude to refuse a slice — not that anyone I know would want to.
If there is any hesitation, we can tell ourselves that we have to eat it or people will call us a cheapskate who is afraid of having to buy the next cake. It’s all part of a long tradition that may have come to North America with our Acadian ancestors.
The first King Cakes were baked in France centuries ago as part of the celebration of the three wise men finding the infant Jesus twelve days after Christmas. At some point, bakers began hiding a bean or pea inside the cake, and the person who got it was declared royalty for the day.
Most histories say the tradition came to Louisiana with its first French settlers, who also brought the celebration of Mardi Gras, but Canadian scholar Carol Blasi says the ritual seems to have been observed in Acadie earlier than 1649, at least fifty years before the first “Louisiana” settlement at Mobile.
In that year, Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, lord of Port Royal, and his wife Jeanne Motin demanded that “on the eve of the Feast of Kings” their tenant Martin Chevery and his wife should present them with “a round cake made of a quarter of a bushel of the finest white wheat flour … and a half dozen eggs, a half pound of butter of the very freshest kind, in the edge of which cake they will place a black bean.” (“Land Tenure in Acadian Agricultural Settlements,” PhD dissertation, University of Maine, 2019, 100)
The King Cake got to Louisiana before the Acadians did, probably by way of Mobile, where some historians believe Mardi Gras was celebrated in the early 1700s. Nobody knows for sure just when Epiphany and Carnival and King Cakes all came together. Most of us are just happy that they did.
Our King Cakes are decorated in the traditional Mardi Gras colors — gold (for power), green (for faith), and purple (for justice). Traditionally, a small plastic baby symbolizing the infant Jesus is hidden in the cake. It’s supposed to bring luck to the person who finds it, but also the obligation to provide the next cake.
Donald Entringer Sr., a Metairie baker, is usually credited with substituting a baby for the traditional bean. In the 1940s. according to most accounts, he was asked by a Carnival krewe to hide prizes in some King Cakes. He added the tiny babies to his batter and a tradition was born.
Some sources say the tradition began earlier than that, but it couldn’t have been much earlier because tiny plastic babies weren’t widely available until after World War II.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Haydel’s Bakery in New Orleans created the world’s largest King Cake in 2010. It took 28 full-time employees to make two cakes huge enough to go around the Superdome.
Both rings of the cakes were record-breaking: One weighed 4,073 pounds, shattering the old record held by a Houston bakery; the other ring weighed 4,068 pounds. Guinness didn’t say how the cakes were weighed or who did it, but it surely was an unwieldy (if not imprecise) process. Guiness is also silent on whether there was baby in the cake, but I know a few folks who might have kept eating until they found out.
There probably wasn’t one. Where are you going to find a plastic baby big enough for a two-ton cake? Besides, a lot of bakers nowadays just send a baby alongside the cake, not baked into it. Their lawyers or OSHA or some authority worried that somebody might choke on one that is hidden.
That’s fine with me, for the same reason some people favor Martinis without olives. Why would you want to take up room with a plastic bauble when it could be filled with the good stuff?
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.