Let's bring back the glorious food traditions of Twelfth Night (largely, lots of cake)

Pastries, punch, cake and kutya – with all these traditions, who needs turkey curry? Twelfth Night is the perfect excuse to have one last feast like a king 

You may be back at work but don’t start the detox just yet, because Christmas doesn’t finish until Twelfth Night is done. No, not the Shakespeare play of the same name, but the festivities marking Epiphany, the arrival of the three kings to Jesus.

These days, not many Brits know much about Twelfth Night, but in the medieval and Tudor periods, it was more important than Christmas Day. And there are plenty of Epiphany rituals - especially regarding food - which are well worth passing onto the next generation.

As recently as the 1950s, Twelfth Night in Britain was a night for wassailing, a tradition that’s enjoying something of a revival. Wassailers, like carol singers, go from house to house singing and wishing their neighbours good health. Every region had its own traditions: in cider making counties like Somerset it was traditional to wish apple farmers good health by visiting their orchard, and in Scotland the tradition lives on as First Footing on New Year’s Day.

"The wassail bowl used to get filled with mulled ale or cider and each house would be asked to add to the bowl," explains Stephen Rowley one of the organisers of the Stroud Wassail. "Lots of the wassailing songs finish with a request for a penny, a cup of cider, and a piece of cake."

The actors of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane have kept the ancient Twelfth Night traditions alive since 1796 with Twelfth Night Cake, traditionally a rich fruitcake with a bean or charm baked into it. (The trinket symbolized luck or prosperity for whoever found it). Keen to make sure the actors always got punch and cake, actor Robert Baddeley left a £100 bequest to this end.

"Twelfth Night in those days was a big thing," says Miranda Fellowes of the Drury Lane Fund. "Baddeley left money in his will, which was invested, and is spent every year on cake and a potent punch made to a secret recipe." Since 1975 the cake has always been themed to match the show on the stage at the time, last year resulting in a chocolate fountain-topped Twelfth Night cake in honour of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical.

The Spanish today still celebrate the day they call Reyes with cake. "It was the day you waited for all year because it’s when you got presents," says Spanish chef and restaurateur Jose Pizarro. "The night before was called Cabalgata de Reyes and the kings would process through the village giving out sweets. On Reyes itself we get everyone together for one last feast at a big table. We normally start with tapas, then eat a dinner of slow roast lamb and finish with the Roscon de Reyes cake."

The French celebrate with cake too. "King's Cake is often eaten all month long," explains Sylvia Kontek, co-owner of French restaurants Bandol and Margaux. "There are different variations on the cake depending on where in France you live. In the North, the cake is called a galette – pastry filled with frangipane, fruit or chocolate – and in the South, the way I know it, it’s a Gateau des Rois, decedent brioche with candied fruits" Like the old-fashioned British cakes, each cake, be it galette or gateau, contains a hidden charm baked into the cake."

Further east, the festivities stretch out even longer. "We celebrated on January 19th, like in most Eastern European countries," says Eastern European cookery writer Olia Hercules, who has memories of celebrating Epiphany in Ukraine. "Water is supposed to be sacred that day so people go swimming in freezing ponds. I remember seeing crazy people in the half-frozen Dnieper river. People make another big meal of kutya which is wheat berry and dried fruit soup, varenyky dumplings, and borsch."

"During the Polish People’s Republic the celebration of The Three Kings was a non-existent holiday,"says Jan Woroniecki, owner of Ognisko and Baltic, "but big cities like Warsaw, Krakow, and Gdansk have reinstated the traditional parade. We eat szczodraki which means ‘generosity pastries’. They’re a seasonal croissant made either sweet or savoury by the filling, the most common being sauerkraut and mushrooms."

As with the British tradition of wassailing, the celebration links to the harvest – in Poland if the year had been good, the szczodraki would be large and generously filled; if it had been a bad year, they’d be made small and without any filling at all.

Pastries, punch, cake and kutya – with all these traditions, who needs turkey curry? Twelfth Night is the perfect excuse to have one last feast like a king. Britain, let's bring it back.