Revivals &
Survivals…
Rediscovering
Dolly Varden Cake
Before you say scornfully, “Yes, I know
what that is” or, more simply “Ugh!” just wait.
There are two periods in the history of the
cakes called “Dolly Varden Cake”, and the modern version has nothing in common with
the original one but its misapplied name
In the 19th century Dolly Varden became a household
word. Cakes, hats, dances, songs and fancy dress were all named for her. In
1902 a whole comic opera bore her name. Round about the 1870s ladies modelled their
dresses after hers. (Read all about this fashion fad in “A
Brief History of the Dolly Varden Dress Craze”, by Natalie Ferguson, on the
web site A Frolic Through Time.)
Who was she?
If you’ve
read Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge you’ll
know. But according to Wikipedia’s entry about the book, it’s one of his least read
works. Why? Don’t ask me, I loved it. In the early 1960s I saw the marvellous 1960
BBC serial of the book, with a young John Wood giving a wonderful performance
as Barnaby, and later I read Dad’s copy of the book. It’s set against the frightening
background of the Gordon Riots of 1780—is the history stuff too hard for a modern
audience? Dolly Varden was a character in the book, a working-class girl, the
daughter of a locksmith. She was pretty, merry, and extremely attractive to the
opposite sex. Dickens introduced her as: “a pretty, laughing girl; dimpled and
fresh, and healthful—the very impersonation of good-humour and blooming beauty.”
She wasn’t the nominal heroine, but she struck a chord with his readers and
became immensely popular over the decades that followed the book’s first publication
in 1840-1841, in his serial, Master
Humphrey’s Clock; With Illustrations by George Cattermole and Hablot Browne
(London, Chapman and Hall).
Here’s how the 19th century depicted Dolly
Varden or the Dolly Varden style. You’ll find more about the fad for all things
Dolly Varden in my other blog, “A Modern Cabinet of curiosities”, under “Regular
Little Dolly Vardens”.
The essential
characteristics of the “Dolly Varden” look were those enumerated by Ardern Holt
in his book on fancy dress:
DOLLY VARDEN
(Barnaby Rudge). Short quilted skirt; bodice and bunched-up tunic of flowered
chintz, the former low and laced across; a muslin kerchief inside; sleeves to
elbow with frill; correctly speaking the hair should not be powdered, as she
did not belong to the upper classes. Straw hat with cherry-colored ribbons, or
muslin cap and apron; high-heeled shoes and bows; colored stockings; mittens.
(Ardern Holt. Fancy Dresses Described, or, What to
Wear at Fancy Balls. 6th ed., London, Debenham & Freebody, 1896)
Take another look
at the pictures. The dresses vary, but they are all distinguished by the double
skirt, the top layer, described as a tunic by Holt, “bunched up”: that is, pannier-style.
The “flowered chintz” wasn’t mandatory, but it was very popular.
It was this double layer effect that was to
be taken up eagerly by the cake bakers of the English-reading public.
Looking at the traditional
Dolly Varden cake
Yes, I did know
who the cake was named after when I found three versions of it in two Australian
cookbooks published around 1949 to 1953. But I didn’t manage to find anything about
its history, either online or in two rather expensive recent tomes on, respectively,
New Zealand and Australian food history. Which is why I ended up researching
the characteristics of Dickens’s Dolly Varden.
In
the first half of the 20th century the “Dolly Varden Cake” was an established favourite.
Don’t rush off and do an Internet search: the references will lead you to the
modern Australian version of the cake—nothing like it. The recipe subsisted
well into the 1950s. It was characterised by at least two different-coloured
layers—like the double layers of Dolly’s skirt as depicted in the 19th-century illustrations.
One was typically plain and lemon-flavoured, the other typically flavoured with
spices and dotted with currants or sultanas, sometimes also containing cocoa.
Variants could have three layers: usually two light, sandwiching the darker one.
I have three relatively early versions of the
cake, from around 1949-1952:
** Two Layers:
(1): Dolly Varden Cake, by E. Norman, Kadina.
(Green and Gold
Cookery Book. 15th ed. (rev.), Adelaide,
R.M. Osborne, circa 1949)
2 layers: 1
plain, flavoured with lemon essence, 1 “dark” with spice, lemon peel, sultanas;
sandwiched with butter icing.
(2): Dolly Vardon Cake [sic], by Mrs. F. Densley
(Bordertown), variant by Mrs. R.P. Wood (Owen).
(Calendar of
Cakes. [4th ed.], Adelaide, South
Australian Country Women's Association, [1951?])
2 layers: 1
plain, flavoured with lemon essence, 1 with cocoa, cinnamon, currants; sandwiched
with jam; icing.
** Three Layers:
Dolly Varden Cake,
by Miss Rehn, W.C.T.U., Adelaide.
3 layers: 2
plain, 1 “brown by adding spice, peel and currants”; sandwiched with pink cream;
pink-tinted coconut added to icing.
They’re all pretty similar, so I’ll just
give the two from the Green and Gold
Cookery Book’s section on “Sponges and Layer Cakes”:
Dolly Varden Cake [2 layers]
Half cup butter, one small cup sugar, 1 1/2
cups S.R. flour, three eggs, three-quarters cup milk.
Divide the mixture into two parts. Into one
put half cup sultanas, little lemon peel, three-quarters of a teaspoonful
vanilla and enough mixed spice to make it dark. Flavour the other half with
essence of lemon. Bake separately in sandwich tins. Fill with icing sugar,
mixed with melted butter and a squeeze of lemon.
--E. Norman, Kadina.
Dolly Varden Cake [3 layers]
One half cupful butter, one cupful sugar, 1
1/2 cupsful flour, two eggs, three-quarter cupful milk, two small teaspoonsful
cream tartar, and one teaspoon carb. soda. Self-raising flour may used instead
of plain flour with cream tartar, soda, etc., added.
Make three layers, two plain and make the
third one brown by adding spice, peel and currants. When cold, whip cream flavoured
with vanilla and icing sugar and place together, the spiced layer in centre and
ice the top and sprinkle with cocoanut coloured with a little cochineal. Add a
little drop of cochineal to cream for the filling when whipped.
--Miss Rehn, W.C.T.U., Adelaide.
(Green
and Gold Cookery Book. 15th ed. (rev.), Adelaide,
R.M. Osborne, circa 1949)
From 1955 to 1968 the New Zealand housewife
had the benefit of the clearest recipe for Dolly Varden Cake that I’ve managed
to find, in the Edmonds Cookery Book.
My edition, reissued in 1968, simply reprints the 1955 edition with the addition
of some extra coloured pages of new recipes and some coloured illustrations.
The original version of this classic cookbook was published in 1908 as the Sure to Rise Cookery Book, so quite
possibly the recipe is decades old, too. It’s a three-layer version, and it actually
tells you the order in which the layers should be placed!
Dolly Varden Cake [3 layers]
8 ozs. butter; 8 ozs. sugar;
4 eggs; 1 tablespoon milk;
10 ozs. flour; 2 teaspoons Edmonds baking powder;
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon; 2 ozs. dates or raisins; 2 ozs. cherries;
1 teaspoon essence of lemon; 1 tablespoon Bourneville cocoa;
1 teaspoon vanilla essence.
Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs and
milk alternatively with sifted flour and baking powder. Divide mixture into
three parts.
FIRST PART: Add fruit and cinnamon.
SECOND PART: Add lemon (middle layer).
THIRD PART: Add cocoa and vanilla (top
layer).
Bake in greased sandwich tins about 25
minutes at 375°F. When cold, put the layers together with a butter
filling.
(Edmonds
Cookery Book. De luxe ed., [Christchurch, N.Z.], T.J. Edmonds Ltd., 1955
(1968 printing))
The cherries,
not present in the other early versions I’ve got, are an interesting touch. The
cherry motif harks right back to Dickens’s original story: Chapter 19 of Barnaby Rudge ends:
“Dolly in the
meanwhile … tripped away by a path across the fields with which she was well acquainted,
to discharge her mission at the Warren; and this deponent hath been informed
and verily believes, that you might have seen many less pleasant objects than the
cherry-coloured mantle and ribbons, as they went fluttering along the green
meadows in the bright light of the day, like giddy things as they were.”
And Dickens’s friend, the painter William
Powell Frith, showed Dolly Varden in her cherry mantle in the painting he
created just after the story was first published:
By 1980 the recipe had all but disappeared,
though Mrs L. Pescott offers a version in her Early Settlers' Household Lore (Rev. ed., Richmond, Vic., Raphael
Arts, 1980). Precisely where she got it from isn’t clear: there are no sources
given. She seems to have collected favourite recipes from all her friends and
acquaintances, and as a result the book represents the food that was eaten at
the time, all mixed up with genuine or rewritten early recipes. I won’t reproduce
her version here: it’s rather muddled and inconsistent—maybe no-one at that time
actually bothered to try it out? Or perhaps it represents a combination of different
sources.
It has three layers: one light, one dark (with
cocoa) and the middle one spotted (with currants). Currants do not appear in
all earlier recipes and in many versions some sort of spice mixture is used
rather than cocoa for a darker layer.
Dolly Varden
rediscovered or buried?
In 2008, when
I started wondering about the history of the cake, I did eventually manage to find
a couple of recipes online for the original Dolly Varden cake. These are both presented
as relics of a bygone era. One, from Mietta’s Recipe Collection, is described
as “Australian traditional. Three differently flavoured cakes layered with
butter icing.” The other is from Gillian Polack, on www.foodpast.com. She writes: “Today’s recipe
is my grandmother’s very 1950s version. No-one round me makes Dolly Varden
cakes anymore [sic]. They used to be very popular, though.” Her version has
three layers, two of them plain.
Curiouser and
Curiouser… The doll in the cake
In the 21st century
the traditional Dolly Varden cake has been replaced in Australia by an extraordinary
revival of the name—why, I can’t discover: possibly someone’s brilliant
perversion of a recipe name she got off her granny, possibly merely a commercial
venture in order to sell fancy cake tins. This new “Dolly Varden” cake consists
of a wide skirt shape as the base, topped with a doll. No kidding.
Here’s a version of the tin:
And here’s a typical example of the recipe,
which, true to its era, uses a packet cake mix:
Australian Women's Weekly Dolly Varden Cake
“This iconic children’s birthday cake was
inspired by the character, Dolly, in one of Charles Dickens’ [sic] novels. A
special baking pan, in the shape of her dress has been created just for this
cake and you’ll need one of them for this recipe.”
470 gram packet butter cake mix
Butter
cream:
125 gram butter; 1 1/2 cup icing sugar;
2 tablespoon milk
Decorations: 200 gram pink and
white [marshmallows];
1 barbie doll, legs removed; 1 metre-long pink ribbon;
1 artificial flower
1. Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced).
Grease dolly varden [sic] pan well.
2. Make cake according to directions on packet;
pour mixture into pan. Bake about 1 hour. Stand cake in pan 5 minutes before
turning onto wire rack to cool completely.
3. Make butter cream: Place butter in a small
bowl of electric mixer; beat until butter is as white as possible, gradually
add about half the icing sugar, beating constantly. Add milk gradually, then
gradually beat in the remaining icing sugar; mixture should be smooth and easy
to spread with spatula.
4. Spread butter cream all over cake. Gently
push doll down into cake to waist level.
5. Halve marshmallows; press marshmallows,
cut-side down, alternating pink and white, all over 'skirt', starting from the
bottom. Wind ribbon around doll's body to represent bodice, tie at the back in
a large bow. Position flower at waist.
Notes: Special Dolly Varden cake tins are
available from most cake decorating suppliers and some kitchenware stores. You
could use one 175 gram packet butter cake mix, if you don’t want to make it
from scratch.
(Australian
Women’s Weekly Food, 2016)
“Iconic”? Hardly!
I doubt if the concoction’s older than the century.
As a recipe, it’s sickening. As a social document,
it’s fascinating. Well, in the first place, the misapplied “iconic.” Then, the
incorrect use of the possessive. True, it’s amazing to find any apostrophes these
days. But the possessive of “Dickens”, Australian
Women’s Weekly editors, is “Dickens’s.” And I hardly think this cake was “inspired
by the character Dolly”. For one thing, if you were talking about Barnaby Rudge, she would be referred to
as “Dolly Varden” not just “Dolly”.
And for another, the cake has nothing in
common with Dickens’s Dolly Varden but its name. Where is the two-layered skirt
that characterised the 19th-century illustrations of Dolly Varden?
The doll in the
cake, or, When is “Dolly” a dolly?
The use of
the doll in the cake is an interesting example of quite a well-known social and
linguistic phenomenon: the assimilation of something less than half-grasped from
the past to something modern and familiar. A “dolly” in modern speech is a child’s
doll. Therefore a “Dolly Varden cake” has got to look like a doll.
In fact in Dickens’s time this usage of “dolly”
for the toy was probably quite infrequent—though it’s hard to tell: it’s an example
of the sort of nursery speech, the addition of -y as a kind of diminutive suffix,
that rarely crept into print in those days. “Doll” in fact was an early
diminutive of “Dorothy”, so Miss Varden’s real name would have been Dorothy. There
are many different meanings of the word “dolly” in English (both as a noun and
as a verb) so it’s hard to tell from mere statistics when the modern usage
became common. (cf Collins
English Dictionary online).
But Merriam-Webster online suggests: “First Known Use of
dolly. Noun: 1790, in the meaning defined at sense 1” (sense 1 being “doll”, “a small-scale figure of a human being used especially as a child’s
plaything”).
Not all that much was being published for
children in the early 19th century, but I did find a few early titles in which “dolly”
is used in the sense of a child’s toy in humanoid form. Throughout the 18th century
“Dolly” was common as a name, and it crops up very frequently in 19th century,
too. These two are the only early titles I located (searching the WorldCat and
Trove databases) which use “dolly” in the modern sense:
(1) ca. 1830:
Little Polly, and
her doll: with numerous neat engravings.
London, Tho. Dean & Co., [ca. 1830]. Title on inside front cover: Little
Polly, and her dolly.
(2) 1849:
Fechner, Clara
Volkmann. Nut-cracker and sugar-dolly,
and other stories and legends for children; illustrated with woodcuts after
designs by Lewis Richter; translated by Charles A. Dana. London, Joseph
Cundall; R. Yorke Clarke and Co., 1849.
Later in the
century the word has clearly become a commonplace, for we find it applied as a
nominal adjective:
Favourite picture
book for the nursery: comprising, 1. Pictures for pets with rambling rhymes, 2.
Illustrated proverbs for the nursery, 3. The queen and princesses of Dolly Land, 4. New scenes of monkey
life; with sixteen pages of illustrations printed in oil colours. London, Edinburgh, New York, T. Nelson and Sons, 1871.
So, the original Dolly Varden has nothing
to do with the dolly cake beloved by modern Australian mums. Weird? You betcha.
But wouldn’t life be boring without such nutty anomalies?
P.S. If you’re
lucky enough to have access to the Australasian
Journal of Popular Culture there is an article in it which could possibly tell
you a lot more: “Dolly Varden: Sweet inspiration”, Volume 2, Number 1, 7 June
2012. I wasted an hour trying to subscribe to the bloody thing: the journal’s
website sent me to the subs website, which sent me back to the journal’s
website, which sent me… Yeah. I finally decided just to buy the article, but
gee! I’d’ve had to pay in $US (for an “Australasian” journal based in AUCKLAND?)
and know what? Last time I did that online the flaming Bendigo Bank froze my
bank account and didn’t bother to let me know, leaving me with only a few dollars
in my purse and unable to place an online grocery order. Over Christmas-New Year,
what’s more. So I retired from the lists, ’cos it was, coincidentally, a year
to the day since that happened.
—Unto them that hath it shall be given or, We’ve
got it, let’s keep it to ourselves. Not an uncommon syndrome in Australasian
Academe—no.
It’s enough to make you go dotty and put on
your Dolly Varden hat!
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