The Etymology of Cake
I have a strong interest in sweets and cakes of all kinds, though I’m rarely impressed. Sweetbreads are often either too sweet, or not sweet enough, too fat, or too dry. But, it’s always a joy to discover a previously unseen cake, even if, often, the experience ends up being a disappointment. But, one has to try.
And, sometimes, like opening up an additional layer, a discovery feels like a distortion of a warped memory of a distant past.
Cakes rarely mean what their names suggest. If anything, the history of cake is a history of drift: ingredients drifting across borders, techniques drifting across generations, and names drifting so far from their origins that they become more suggestion than description.
Today, in Guarujá, just off the beach, close to São Paulo, I once again encountered a fatia húngara. Not uncommon in bakeries across São Paulo, it is a slice of rolled sweet bread, perfumed with coconut, more pão doce (sweet bread) than sobremesa (dessert). It is dry, restrained, and meant to be eaten with coffee. Little about this not-quite-pastry is recognisably Hungarian. But, the name persists.
Having lived in Hungary in a previous century, it is tempting to search for a lost lineage: a forgotten Hungarian baker, a vanished recipe, a displaced tradition, or perhaps refugees recreating a childhood delicacy. But, I also know that that instinct already misunderstands how cake names function; Instead of describing a historical journey, a cake name is a gesture, here towards Europe, and perhaps towards tradition.
The Hungarian that never arrived
Hungary does, of course, have many famous pastries, including one that carries at least some resemblance to the fatia húngara, the kürtőskalács, also known as the chimney cake. This rolled up bread, is made from yeasted dough, wrapped around a spit, and roasted over open fire, then rolled in sugar that caramelises into a brittle crust. I first encountered it close to Heroes’ Square in Budapest, served outside in the wintery cold. And so, being prepared out in the open, it’s performative, as well as aromatic, inseparable from fire, smoke, and the public space.
Sadly, there appears to be no credible historical path from kürtőskalács to fatia húngara. The Brazilian pastry is baked in trays, sliced cold, and eaten indoors. What connects them is not culinary genealogy but form: the bread spiral. The spiral perhaps once read as foreign, elaborate, “European enough.” And perhaps the first baker to give the roll its Hungarian name had only just spoken to a Hungarian immigrant, fresh off the boat. After all, the fatia húngara is more Paulista than Brasiliera.
So, the Hungarian of fatia húngara is not a place or an indication of historical provenance, but an adjective pointing to something fancy. It’s imported sophistication, stripped of geography and history.
Even so, occasionally, cake does survive the journey. In the Brazilian northeast, in João Pessoa, it is possible to encounter an actual kürtőskalács… stuffed with homemade ice cream. Fire meets freezer. Street food becoming dessert architecture. The chimney traveled, survived, and mutated to fit climate, taste, and commerce.
A cake named by someone who met foreigners
It’s not too difficult to find more of these displaced histories in Brazil. The, literally famous, Torta holandesa is a telling example. Despite its name, it has absolutely no Dutch culinary ancestry. The dessert was created in Brazil, and only in the 1990s, by a Brazilian baker who worked for a Dutch family, in England, while using as the basis the very Brazilian pavê, which is a bit like a pie of cookies. The cake is not Dutch; it is, oddly, about having known Dutch people.
There’s more:
- “German” cakes that are really Brazilian sponge with chocolate,
- “Swiss” pies that contain condensed milk and margarine,
- “Italian” desserts that Italians would stare at in silence.
Cake names, here, are more like oral footnotes: vague markers of contact, memory, or aspiration.
Cake as a false map
Seen this way, cakes form a kind of false cartography. Their names point one way, their recipes another, their histories somewhere else entirely. They are very unreliable guides, if excellent records of desire.
Though triggering a thin burst of nostalgia, the fatia húngara did not actually tell me anything about Hungary. Instead, it’s an imperfect record of the history of São Paulo bakeries, through postwar European aspiration, limited by which flavours were available, affordable, and desirable. Coconut replaced cinnamon, not because of history, but because of habit, or, simply, for the sake of being practical.
And so, these cake names are not actual etymologies, but compressed narratives, constructed from fragments of migration, misunderstanding, admiration, and reinvention.
I ate my fatia húngara, not too impressed, while reminiscing over the first kürtőskalács I remember experiencing and the, what of course seemed like, simpler times. My personal take on this has to be fairly unique; how many were introduced, as an adult, to kürtőskalács during important formative years, to then, years later, learn of the Brazilian fatia húngara? So, my take is not the reason for the enduring popularity of the Brazilian version. What might be is that cake can ‘forget’ where it came from and taste exactly like where it is.
(If you’re wondering, the image at the top is neither a kürtőskalács, nor a fatia húngara.)