Marzipan, Eliza Marchpane and the East End of London
Christmas is a time of tradition and indulgence. A stuffed goose has given way to the turkey and Christmas pudding is a popular choice instead of plum duff.
But one thing remains – Yuletide is a time of feasting, and dining on delicacies we never really eat for the rest of the year.
The centrepiece of any Christmas is the cake, with its rich casing of marzipan. And the soft yellow paste had been a rare luxury in Europe for centuries before it caught on here.
How it did so is a remarkable story for marzipan owes its popularity in England, and its very name, to a poor girl from Stepney who fled the East End to seek fame and fortune.
Eliza Marchpane was born in 1760 and, like thousands of other girls born in Stepney that year, faced a miserable life of drudgery, poverty, marriage – if she was lucky – followed by a huge brood of children.
Then, if she were lucky, her almost-certain early demise would be a peaceful and painless one.
Of course one way to scrape a living was to follow the tradition of countless other cockney girls of the time, and become a prostitute, working the inns of Wapping and Radcliffe.
That was the path Eliza took. But, looking around her at the women who had been plying the same trade for a dozen years or more, she realised she would soon be old before her time and her value would fade.
Passage to Paris
She decided to move upmarket. Saving her money, she bought a passage onboard a ship to the continent. In Paris she purchased one set of fine clothes and adopted the title ‘Marquesa de Marchpane’.
In England, her accent marked her out as a guttersnipe. To unaccustomed ears in the salons and boudoirs of Europe, she sounded strange and exotic.
The beautiful Eliza moved around the courts of Europe, becoming a famed courtesan, with a string of aristocratic lovers swelling her fortune.
In the 1790s she came to Vienna, where she seduced the young musical genius Mozart, composer of the Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. And it was in Vienna, the most fashionable city in Europe at the time, that she first tasted little delicacies, fashioned from almond paste.
Eliza was back in London at the turn of the 19th century, but she certainly wasn’t going to revisit her Stepney roots. ‘The Marquesa de Marchpane’ was rich and established and now had a suitably ‘foreign’ accent by way of disguise.
She set up home in the affluent West End, where she would give dinner parties and soirees. The exotic and beautiful Continental courtesan was a huge hit and her parties boasted many dishes and delicacies imported from Europe – among them the little sweets and fruits made from ‘marchpane’, or marzipan as it become known.
Marzipan became a delicacy – sugar and almonds were still relatively expensive and made it the province of the rich.
By the time Eliza died in Brighton in 1830, she had been the lover of the dandified and promiscuous Prince Regent, the future George IV, and marzipan was fast becoming an integral part of Christmas.
And when Charles Dickens penned his descriptions of ‘traditional’ English Yule feasts 20 years later, the marzipan-clad Christmas cake was a firm – and cheap – popular favourite.
Eliza had fulfiled her aim, to escape poverty and an early death, to find riches. But with all her rich imagination, she could never have dreamed of her legacy to our Christmas a century later.