Future Cake
HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO, expr. For a long time I didn’t understand this expression. As a kid I thought, “isn’t having a piece of cake the same thing as eating a piece of cake?” After all, in English you can ask “would you like to have a piece of cake?” and we understand that as an offer of something to eat. What am I going to do, say yes and then hoard the cake until it’s stale? Please. That cake is going directly in my mouth.
It wasn’t until I heard the French equivalent, “avoir/vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre,” to have/to want the butter and the money from the butter, that it clicked for me. This is a phrase about wanting two contradictory things at once. If you sell the butter, you get the money but the butter is gone. If you keep the butter, you get no money. You can’t have both. That’s what it means.
The French expression carries a connotation of exchange that isn’t present in the English, since the butter is part of a transaction, not just something to be eaten. And the internet tells me that the French has some longer forms about wanting the butter, the money from the butter, and “le sourire/les fesses/le cul de la crémière.” From saucy to vulgar, that’s the milkmaid’s smile, her bottom, or her ass. I’ve never heard anyone say this, but I’m tickled that there’s an X-rated Money From the Butter Extended Universe.
As for the origin of the French, I found a dubious online attribution to former President of Switzerland Numa Droz in an 1896 work called Essais économiques. While I did find the passage in Gallica (“Dans toute transaction commerciale, il faut donner pour recevoir. On ne peut pas, comme on dit vulgairement, avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre”; In any commercial transaction, one must give to receive. One cannot, as is commonly said, have the butter and the money from the butter), this can’t be the first instance, since Droz himself writes “as is commonly said.” So take all that with a pat of salted butter. The expression is probably much older.
For the curious, which I know you are, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first “eate your cake, and haue your cake” example dates from 1546. That’s hundreds of years we’ve been yearning to possess Present Cake and Future Cake at once.
Cake has been on my mind lately because my current hobby project is baking my way through Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes. It’s not the sort of book I usually talk about in this newsletter (though I have previously discussed baking), but it is one of the books I refer to most often these days. The recipes take about twenty minutes and use things I already have on hand. I would certainly rather have the butter than the money, and I’d rather have cake than either.
Some of the snacking cakes I’ve made over the past few months. From top left: salty caramel peanut butter cake, cocoa yogurt cake with cocoa glaze, almondy plum cake, espresso chocolate chip cake, cornmeal upside-down cake with peaches, chocolate and zucchini cake and seedy zucchini cake, berry cream cheese cake, olive oil chocolate cake with raspberries.
It’s fitting that translating “have your cake and eat it too” was what made the expression’s meaning click for me, because my fiction reading these past couple of weeks was consumed by R. F. Kuang’s historical fantasy novel Babel or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. In the usual framework of this newsletter, this book is neither Capital-R Romance (that is to say, written in a Romance language) nor small-r romance (fiction with a central love story and a happily ever after), but it is adjacent to both. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel with this many etymologies in it, and many of them are Romance, though happily Kuang gathers together many more language families. And while Babel’s ending doesn’t qualify as a happily ever after from any angle, and you won’t catch me trying to sell this book as “a love story” to you, my genre-savvy readers, I think that romance fans who dip their toes into fantasy will find this a satisfying reading experience—as long as they’re into some consensual pain. What draws me to genre romance most of all is the characters, and Babel has wonderfully vivid characters.
The protagonist is Robin Swift, a biracial Chinese man born in Canton. In the first scene of the book, his Chinese mother is dead from the 1828 cholera epidemic in the city and he’s awaiting the same fate. An Oxford professor named Richard Lovell arrives, heals Robin, and offers to take him to England to educate him, provided that Robin sign a contract delineating his duties to the professor and the limits of what the professor owes him. Even as a child, Robin—who is not born Robin, but whose Chinese name is specifically, deliberately excluded from the text—suspects that this English stranger might be his father, but the professor never says so. He treats Robin like a tool, housing, feeding, and training him so he can one day attend the Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford, nicknamed “Babel.”
At Babel, translators empower the British Empire through magic called silverwork. A silver bar, engraved on one side with a word in one language and on the other with its translation, stores and channels power from the difference between the words. What is lost in translation is gained in magic. Mandarin Chinese “wúxíng” (formless, shapeless, incorporeal) and English “invisible,” for instance, are a match-pair that can hide a person from sight if they hold the bar and speak the words. The magic only works if someone who truly understands the words is the one to speak them, so translators are extraordinarily valuable to the Empire, and Babel is the only part of Oxford that allows people of color and women to become students.
Silver powers the Empire’s guns and ships and decorates the homes of the wealthy, but its power diminishes with use, so Latin, Romance languages, Greek, and German are almost used up, making Robin’s knowledge of Chinese even more valuable. This is such a smart way to intertwine magic and imperialism, I’m still agog. And the fact that the magic uses silver, a good that has to be plundered (ahem, “traded”), so the power of language becomes a material thing… Apologies if you thought I was going to write anything insightful about this book. I’ve been thinking about it for days and I still have nothing to say but “WOW.”
It’s not just the premise that wowed me, though let’s be real the premise is fucking great. Robin arrives at Oxford and meets his cohort: a young Muslim man from Calcutta named Ramy, a young Black woman from the French-speaking world named Victoire, and a young white woman from England named Letty. Bound by their passion for languages and their unusual circumstances, marginalized at Oxford and in England by race or gender or both, the four of them form a tight-knit group of friends. Kuang really delves into their time at Oxford, writing in beautiful prose about their studies, their lives on campus in the 1830s, and their feelings for each other. It’s so beautiful that it will make you want to be there—except that we know, as readers, and as Robin does, that the whole thing is founded on rot. The Empire’s exploitation and violence funds life at Oxford, just as scholars at Oxford use their knowledge to make the Empire’s military faster and deadlier.
Robin knows this. He knows the Professor let his mother die of cholera and saved him only to treat him like a thing. He knows he will never be fully accepted in England. He knows Ramy and Victoire suffer even more discrimination due to their dark skin. He knows the way the Empire treats his homeland is wrong. And yet still, he hears the siren song of life as an Oxford translator—and who could blame him? Kuang captures everything wonderful about life on campus, especially the close friendships that Robin forms with his cohort. (What Robin and Ramy feel for each other is better described as love, but if I start talking about that, this 2,000-word email will double in length.) The passage that follows is a long quotation, but please know that I am restraining myself and I actually wanted to quote several more. They’re just so marvelous.
Ramy gesticulated wildly as he spoke. It was clear he wasn’t truly angry, just passionate and clearly brilliant, so invested in the truth he needed the whole world to know. Robin leaned back and watched Ramy’s lovely, agitated face, both amazed and delighted.
He could have cried then. He’d been so desperately lonely, and had only now realized it, and now he wasn’t, and this felt so good he didn’t know what to do with himself.
When at last they grew too sleepy to finish their sentences, the sweets were half-gone and Ramy’s floor was littered with wrappers. Yawning, they waved each other good night. Robin tripped back to his own quarters, swung the door shut, then turned around to face his empty rooms. This was his home for the next four years – the bed under the low, sloping ceiling where he would wake every morning, the leaking tap over the sink where he would wash his face, and the desk in the corner that he would hunch over every evening, scribbling by candlelight until wax dripped onto the floorboards.
For the first time since he’d arrived at Oxford, it struck him that he was to make a life here. He imagined it stretched out before him: the gradual accumulation of books and trinkets in those spare bookshelves; the wear and tear of those crisp new linen shirts still packed in his trunks, the change of seasons seen and heard through the wind-rattled window above his bed that wouldn’t quite shut. And Ramy, right across the hall.
This wouldn’t be so bad.
God, all those beautiful details of college life, of meeting a new person and instantly connecting, and then finishing with “this wouldn’t be so bad,” a line that reads as both hopeful (from Robin at that present moment) and heartbreaking (because the narration has given us glimpses of the future, so we already know it’ll all go wrong).
The plot is propelled by Robin and his cohort’s very close friendship and the choices the four of them make together. You get such a sense of all four of them as people that everything that happens feels inevitable—of course that person was going to make that choice all along—but only after the fact. Babel’s first half is paced more slowly than its blistering, breakneck second half, but it never feels like dawdling. Everything that happens in Robin’s studies feels magical and important, and I swear I’m not just saying that because I’m a nerd who reads dictionaries for fun.
That said, if you are a nerd who reads dictionaries for fun, this book is a feast. There are etymologies all over the place, in the main text and also in the copious, incisive footnotes, explored at length for their magical properties and also used like this:
[‘]Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?’
‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’
The asterisk there is for a footnote offering the Latin root (nescius, meaning ignorant or not knowing, in which you can see “scius,” related to science) and its journey through Old French (nice, meaning weak, clumsy, silly). You can see why I loved this novel so very much.
And speaking of etymologies again, “cake,” by the way, is a bit of a mystery. It has nothing to do with the word “cook” and is likely a borrowing from early Scandinavian. The OED lists related words in Old Icelandic, Old Swedish, and Old Danish that all seem to mean “a flour-based baked good that isn’t bread” and then moves on to Germanic relatives—“cake” is related to German “Kuchen”—but what stands out most in the entry is
and probably also Norwegian kok , (regional) koke heap (especially of dung), clod, lump, Old Swedish koka (Swedish regional kok , koka clod, lump (of earth, dung, etc.))
“Heap of dung” to “delicious thing you put in your mouth” is a hell of a semantic shift. We do still use “cake” that way in English sometimes, talking about boots being caked with mud or cakes of manure, but the “baked good” definition is certainly the primary one. Naturally since I learned this, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering what magical result might be achieved by inscribing one of Babel’s silver bars with Norwegian “kok” and English “cake,” but I can’t imagine that anything good would come of it. Maybe that’s the point of the book.
