Bon Appetit?
On March 28, 1942, one of the first major air attacks by the British on a German city left 25,000 people homeless and destroyed three main churches and half of the city’s historic center. But miraculously a cake was able to survive beneath all the rubble and dirt.
The 79-year-old cake doesn’t look as appetizing as it once might have been but the details from the swirly icing on top to the decorations on the side are somewhat still intact. The almond and hazelnut cake which was still wrapped in wax paper to keep it fresh was discovered in a Lubeck cellar, next to a complete coffee service that had been set out for the family’s Palm Sunday morning. Little did they know that they wouldn’t get a chance to take even a small bite of that cake…
“[The cake] is heavily charred and blackened with soot on the outside,” said Lisa Renn, local excavation manager, in a statement about the find. “The heat has shrunk it to just a third of its original height.”
The house where the mummified cake was found belonged to a family of a local merchant named Johann Hitze in Alfstrasse. The kitchen was in the basement which is one of the reasons why the cake managed to survive all these years, buried under the debris of the building after it was destroyed by the bombs.
According to the excavation team, the scene looked like it was set up for a traditional confirmation ceremony, with the family’s good china set laid out with the exquisitely decorated cake and coffee service and there was even a musical entertainment planned with several gramophone records including Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and symphony no. 9: symphonie avec chœur en ré mineur found amongst the artifacts. Just like a scene from a medieval German city 80 years ago…
