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Today is la Diada, the Catalan national day, marking Catalonia’s defeat 300 years ago at the hands of Philip V of Spain during the siege of Barcelona. After losing this battle, Catalans also lost their constitutions and their nationhood, yet this overwhelming defeat is the day they have chosen to celebrate Catalonia. In the 1990s, independence flag-wielding anarchists would spend the day smashing up the windows of McDonald’s – but then they would go home to eat cake. Today, there are numerous pro-referendum protests taking place all over the country, with at least half a million people expected to attend. Then they too will go home for some cake.
As befitting one of the most culinary developed regions in the world, there is an official Diada cake for both anarchists and mild-mannered demonstrators to come home to. In 1977, pastry chef Miquel Comas i Figueras developed the official recipe, which was then made by the Catalan Association of Pastry Chefs and presented to the Catalan parliament’s president in exile, Josep Tarradellas, in France. While the Diada cake has many different variations, the official one, made from sponge covered in peach jam with creme patissiere and red strips to look like the Catalan flag, is what all the others base their recipes on. Many cake shops are still faithful to the 1977 version.
You have to admire a place that expresses its national identity through defeat and cake. Even we Scots, masters of self-loathing and prone to feelings of failure, choose to celebrate every rugby win as a rerun of the victorious Bannockburn. No one mentions Culloden when we (regularly) lose at football.
It is surely worth while emulating nationhood through the medium of cake. Unlike Spain, we don’t have a strong tradition of great pastry chefs slaving away on complicated cakes as works of art. No, we are the nation of amateur bakers; ours is the melting moment, the victoria sponge, the drop scone. We like our cakes to be sponge, with easy and risk-free assemblage. We love nothing more than witnessing collapsing constructions of the overly ambitious on competitive baking shows on the telly.
But what we do have is that sponge backbone of all four nations – the Women’s Institute. Be it the Presbyterian coffee morning or the Anglican church fete, the WI has been instrumental in keeping all of us in tea and cake. While we may be about to carve out new, separate destinies, we will all always have a middle-aged lady with a pot of tea and something sweet to help us cope with all eventualities. But how would we express the soul of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland through cake?
The opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games hinted at Scotland’s likely official cake. It could be a giant Tunnock’s tea cake sitting on a meringue Nessie, though I wonder if the WI couldn’t do a saltire-style dundee cake with a shortbread base, or think up something better. Would the Welsh get a dragon-shaped iced monstrosity or would they go for a lighter glazed flag on top, as the Catalans do? Would Northern Ireland make a sweet soda farl with cream? Would England go for the best of all worlds – a spiced ginger simnel cake with an iced St George’s flag, perhaps?
Whatever we end up with on 19 September, we should let ourselves eat cake. But which one?
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