The story
For a long time, a cake was a fine prize. In 1847, an American writer describing a Kentucky horse race spoke of the winning horse taking “the cakes.” To take the cake was to win.
Many trace the saying’s fame to the cakewalk. Historians believe it began before the Civil War among enslaved Black Americans on Southern plantations. Couples paraded in high, graceful steps, and some accounts say the dance quietly mocked the stiff manners of plantation ballrooms.
The most stylish couple won a cake. In 1874, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported that the judges “awarded the cake, which was a very beautiful and costly one,” to the winning pair.
By the 1890s the cakewalk was a nationwide fad, danced on stages and in parlors across the country. As it spread, so did the phrase. Over time it took on a teasing edge, and today it often greets the most outrageous thing anyone has heard all day.
