LET THEM EAT CAKE: A Comparison of the Viral Cake Trend with a Satirical Roman Dinner Party.

A viral trend has recently devoured the internet, taking Facebook, Twitter and TikTok in its stride: cakes that don’t look like cakes. This sounds like a bizarre and delicious trend - which is absolutely correct. Bakers across the world have started to create cakes disguised as anything from toilet rolls to full roast dinners. Anything, that is, except cake.

This sugary craze has existed for a while, but some point to @Tasty ‘s Twitter post on 8th July as the starting point of the trend becoming a viral phenomenon. Either way, it has apparently split opinions in two; some absolutely love to watch a Croc shoe transform into a dessert, others cannot stand the deception. Either way, people are fascinated. But what is it about non-cakes being cakes that captivates us as human beings?

I’ll start by saying that I am no scientist, but being fooled by food is something that is exciting to us for many reasons. Firstly, it is cake, which is enough to gobble the attention of most people. Secondly, we are impressed when someone is able to make a hyper-realistic version of something out of non-artistic materials and make us believe that a trainer is actually a light and fluffy Victoria sponge. Thirdly, it has become a game. TikTokkers have gone viral for simply guessing whether designs are what they first appear to be or not. And this is where it gets interesting…

Some people disregard these internet trends as a complete waste of time, and something only millennial social-media addicts can actually pretend to enjoy. To them, it is a mind-numbing and pointless exercise that only serves to prove the poor sense of humour of the youth, warped by their perpetual online existence. And yet, it would appear that these trends existed way before the invention of the internet. Nearly one thousand years prior, actually.

The Satyricon is a famous ‘novel’ written by Gaius Petronius in the late first century AD. It follows the strange escapades of Encolpius and his sixteen year-old slave (and boyfriend) Giton. One of these stories follows Encolpius and Giton to a dinner party, hosted by a man called Trimalchio. Trimalchio is a part of the ‘nouveaux riche,’ a term used to describe, in this case, a man who used to be a slave and now has too much money for his own good. His excessive and extravagant spending is what would have made his dinner party so comical and fascinating to Roman readers, who viewed these types of men as superstitious, flashy, and obsessed with jokes about the toilet.

A depiction of Trimalchio's banquet in its upmost chaos.

Let me start by saying that you should not continue to read if you have a severe hangover. This was a lesson sorely learned by my classmate when I studied this text, who nearly didn’t make it through the chapter and turned every colour that is possible within the human complexion.

Trimalchio’s dinner party is made up of twelve courses, each one somehow worse than the last. He disguises foods as other foods or humans, presents them in unnecessarily strange shows with dancers and dogs, and forces his guests to engage in his immature roleplays. So, if the video in which someone created a raw-chicken cake made your stomach turn, this blog probably isn’t for you.

Cake styled as raw chicken (who asked for this?!)

The first significant example of food-disguising is when one of Trimalchio’s slaves bring in a dish with a wooden hen on it, sitting atop what appear to be her eggs. The slaves extravagantly rummage to music as if they are collecting the eggs from the hen and pass them around to the guests. Encolpius nearly refuses to eat his egg for he ‘discerned a chick inside’ but discovers that it is actually made of bread, and ‘inside the shell I found a very fine fat beccafico [sardine] swimming in egg yolk flavoured with pepper.’ We will come to see that this is actually simple and reserved stuff for Trimalchio’s chefs.

Another course witnesses slaves chasing Spartan hunting dogs around the table, and then bringing in a wild boar with a freedman’s cap on his head (which newly freed slaves received as a token of their freedom.) The boar is surrounded by boar piglets, crafted from pastry. Suddenly, a huge, bearded slave comes in and slices open the boar’s side with a hunting knife. Live birds soar out of the supposed hog and are caught by frantic slaves with nets; it turns out that the hog is not the course, but the birds instead.

The most grotesque of these examples is based around another hog roast. In a bizarre spectacle, the hog is shown to the guests when it is alive, and then is supposedly cooked in a matter of seconds, much to their horror. Trimalchio pretends that he is furious at the cook, ordering him to gut the hog in front of the dinner party as a form of humiliation. The nervous cook slashes open the pretend hog, and out fall sausages and black puddings in a strange imitation of guts and intestines (see 4:30 in recreation below.) Naturally, this is immediately followed by a troupe of acrobats swinging from the ceiling.

The tricks never seem to end. There is a goose made out of pig’s meat, fish made out of the same, and fruits filled with saffron so that they explode yellow juice onto the guests' clothing. There is also a statue of the fertility god Priapus made out of pastries and grapes (a nod to his immature humour - research images of Priapus to understand why), and a full replica of all the zodiac signs made from animal testicles, wombs, fish and cheesecake. Surprisingly enough, it takes Trimalchio pretending to host his own funeral before Encolpius and Giton decide to make a run for it.

It must be remembered that Petronius was writing this as satire. This was as amusing to the Romans as it is to a modern audience, as so will be the countless immature toilet and sex jokes that Trimalchio spouts. The host’s perversions of food even split his dinner guests’ opinions within the story. One thing is for sure; it was fascinating to readers otherwise it wouldn’t have been such a popular and funny piece to read! It goes to show that food, for some, has always had the potential to deceive, to traumatise and to impress.

Maybe we do have too much time on our hands when we watch cake videos, just as Trimalchio had too much money to make his creations; either way, both have had the ability to entertain audiences hundreds of years apart. The fact that we as a modern audience can be entertained for free by a baker on the other side of the world rather than having to listen to Trimalchio's lengthy anecdotes is just the icing on the cake.

Depiction of Trimalchio's banquet.

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References:

Petronius, The Satyricon, translated by J. P. Sullivan, (Penguin Classics, 2011)

Schmeling, Gareth. “Trimalchio's Menu and Wine List.” Classical Philology, vol. 65, no. 4, (1970), 248–251.

https://www.dentonisd.org/cms/lib/TX21000245/Centricity/domain/997/projects/housewarming%20party/Simple%20version%20of%20Trimalchio%202012.pdf - Simple translation of the dinner party