REMARKABLE and mysterious’ was the verdict a century ago of German novelist Thomas Mann on marzipan. For a millennium, the almond-and-sugar paste has tantalised palates across Europe and the Near East and typically encases Christmas cakes throughout the British Isles, a sweet, rich layer between sponge and icing, varying in colour from off-white to golden yellow. Mann grew up in the Baltic marzipan-making town of Lubeck, but he attributed to marzipan an exoticism at odds with that waterside medieval enclave dominated by its pencil-sharp church towers. Instead, he regarded marzipan as thrillingly ‘oriental’: ‘a confection for the harem’.
Mann’s delight in this simple, but distinctive-tasting confectionery has always been widely shared. Writing in of 1615, Gervase Markham claimed that marzipan deserved ‘the first place, the middle place and, written 20 years earlier, a Capulet servant called Peter asks that he be saved a piece of marchpane—or marzipan—when a feast is cleared away. Costly and rarefied as a result of its high sugar content, historically, marzipan was prized as much for its exclusivity as its taste. Peter and his ilk were unlikely to eat any, save the gleanings from their masters’ tables.
