Yule cake

I was reading about Christmas customs in Somerset, and all the various activities and traditions which happened in the past. Somerset has always been a farming area and through the middle ages the highlight of the long cold winters would be Christmas. Farmers would celebrate on Christmas Day with their families, but on Christmas eve they would have a supper for his men.

There would be a great steaming bowl of furmenty or frumenty, frumentee, furmity or fromity, a bowl of cracked whea, cooked in milk, almond milk or water, and heavily laced with with alcohol, arming in every sense. There would be everything else you might expect a farmer to put on his table, bread and cheese – a Cheddar type no doubt, pickles, and usually a huge pie filled with meat and game. After the savoury, then it was the cake.

Now the source I have says that traditionally they would have ‘a Yule or some other rich cake’. We think of Yule cakes as Yule logs – those Swiss rolls covered with chocolate and icing, patterned with a fork and sprinkled with icing sugar to look like a log covered in snow. I don’t think farmers in the middle ages – or farmer’s wives would have made chocolate cakes… for lots of reasons, chiefly that chocolate came from the New World and didn’t become fashionable until much later. So what is a Yule cake? I have no idea! I can’t find anything about it, but I guess it is some sort of fruit cake, but the exact recipe is a mystery! I’ll keep investigating though!