This struck me as unusual so I thought I'd ask.
I'm reading some minutes of a church meeting held in April 1841 in Manchester, England. It mentions that a visiting preacher presented a "richly ornamented cake" made by his wife in New York City and that they distributed cake to nearly 700 people. This preacher wasn't especially wealthy, so I imagine it was the kind of cake an average American woman could make in 1841.
What kind of cake would've been likely sent? A really fast Atlantic crossing in 1841 was about 2 weeks--what kind of cake could hold up in the mail for 2 or 3 weeks? That was also big enough for 700 people to have a taste?
What would a "richly ornamented" cake look like in 1841?
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity!
fruit cakes, rum cakes, panettone all tend to be very rich, and/or including alcohol. instead of refined white sugar, they usually used molasses (or 'treacle' in England), honey, blackstrap, etc.
this gives them very long shelf lives. they were often further wrapped in linen soaked in alcohol.
sugar and especially honey are preservatives (think jams and jellies for example), as is alcohol. alcohol also keeps the cake feeling moist, where that moisture (as if from water) would evaporate. and sugar additionally is hygroscopic, it holds moisture (retains it), again keeping the cake from going dry and hard.
an example of the way that sugar keeps things moits would be to compare prosciuttio to an amercian country ham. both are salt cured and allowed to air dry. but the country ham incorporates sugar. this keeps the meat much more moist than prosciutto. it does the same for cake.