Almost everyone has seen or at least heard about the strange bachelor party tradition of a half-clothed woman jumping out a huge cake. It turns up more often in decades-old tv shows, comics, and old films, but this tradition still exists today at lavish Vegas shindigs- though the cakes are not original, they’re just made of flimsy cardboard. Younger people who are reading this may have first seen this ritual in “The Sims: House Party” game in which players could buy a giant cake and then choose a command to hire an entertainer. If you think that this tradition dates back to pre-feminist Mad Men era, well, you’re just partly right here- humans have been putting weird things in their food for just entertainment for years.
How it all started?
But, there’s no one who threw a party like the Ancient Romans. They might have been the first to combine entertainment and food; that is the food was also the entertainment. Wealthy banquet-throwers tried to beat the competition by providing exotic dishes like serving up ostriches, peacocks, rare songbirds, and dormice. Particularly, stuffing one animal inside another animal was a delight, so guests might find a roasted pig inside the belly of a cow. The pig could have been stuffed with a lamb, a chicken, mouse, or a rabbit.
This trend continued in the 1600s. Famous families like the de Medicis were surprising guests with live birds in pastry crust for a wedding party.
And in the 1800s, the humans started having girls inside the cake. Wealthy men used this to entertain other important males while their wives stayed at home. One of the hosts who did this was Stanford White, a wealthy architect who threw a dinner party in New York City back in 1895 for famous men, including inventors Nikola Tesla and illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.
The main attraction of the dinner party was an enormous cake, out of which 15 or 16-year-old beautiful girl, Susie Johnson, appeared. According to the famous model Evelyn Nesbit, she was just wearing a piece of see-through gauze. Along with the girl, there were a lot of birds too.
From this point in time, the dinner party with a tradition of women jumping out of cake became famous. It was the 1950s when mainstream media showed it on different TV shows and movies. And it also became a famous part of the bachelor’s party, and many bachelor parties included this kind of entertainment.
Final words
All of this was started by the Romans putting food in food, and then it was adopted by Americans, who started putting girls in the cake to entertain their guests.
