THE CAT'S PAJAMAS XXXIV

Tad Tuleja

 

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases

 

CHEESECAKE

 

It's fairly widely recognized among slangophiles that many turns of phrase relating to cake hark back to the black "cake walks" of Reconstruction days. In these popular walking competitions, the couple that displayed the most style was declared the winner, and often took the cake - that is, took home a cake as a prize. It was white observers of these "fancy strut" contests who, being unwilling or unable to compete themselves, demeaned the contests as "mere walking," and gave us cakewalk and piece of cake for something easy. What is seldom remembered is that these cake walks engendered rude parodies in the white community. Beginning around 1900, many small towns held weekly "cheesecake walks," in which the participants were not couples but local prostitutes, and in which the strutting was accompanied by striptease. Like dogfights and prostitution itself, these "entertainments" were widely banned, with no visible effect on their popularity. The backdoor entrepreneurs who ran them presented cheesecakes to the most stylish strippers as a way of mocking the original black genre, and cheesecake soon came to be applied to the undressed prize-winner as well as to the prize. Beefcake came in much later, as a way of describing "beefy" (muscular) male dancers whose behavior paralleled that of the strippers.