Pat-a-Cake
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can;
Pat it and prick it and mark it with B,
And put it in the oven for baby and me.
Where the rhyme comes from
Pat-a-Cake — or Patty Cake, the form most often used in the United States — is one rhyme under two spellings, and one of the oldest in the nursery. According to Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, its earliest recorded version turns up not in a children’s book but on the stage, in Thomas D’Urfey’s comedy The Campaigners (1698), where a nurse says to her charges: “…and pat a cake Bakers man, so I will master as I can, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and throw’t into the Oven.” There is no letter yet, and no baby — just a nurse’s patter, pricking away at an imaginary cake.
The rhyme next appears in Mother Goose’s Melody, a collection dated to around 1765, and there it is “Patty Cake” from the very first word: “Patty Cake, Patty Cake, / Baker’s Man; / That I will Master, / As fast as I can; / Pat it and prick it, / And mark it with a T, / And there will be enough for Tommy and me.” The letter has arrived, and so has the child — Tommy, not Baby. The wording has gone on shifting ever since, and the cake line still varies from family to family: some pat it and prick it, others pat it and roll it, and neither is wrong. The rhyme is number 6486 in the Roud Folk Song Index, whose entry is drawn from the Opies. No author is known.
Why mark a cake at all? The usual explanation is that households without an oven of their own took their bread and pastry to a local baker or bakehouse to be baked for a small fee, and a mark on the top was a way of making sure the right cake came home. It is a sensible idea, and the line may reflect it — but it is repeated far more often than it is evidenced, and we have found no source that ties the custom to the rhyme itself.
What does it mean?
The meaning is in the playing. Pat-a-Cake is a pretend baking game: the cake is patted, pricked, marked and put in the oven, all with a baby’s hands. No hidden meaning has been seriously proposed — there is no plague, no king and no siege here. It is simply a baby’s clapping game that happens to be one of the oldest rhymes in print.
The letter on the cake. The “B” is for baby, and the rhyme invites you to change it. The Tommy-and-T printing shows the letter bending to suit the child more than two and a half centuries ago, and parents still swap in their own child’s initial and name — “mark it with R, and put it in the oven for Rosie and me”.
Pat-a-cake or patty cake? Both. They are the same rhyme, and neither spelling is a newcomer: “pat a cake” is the nurse’s phrase of 1698, and “Patty Cake” heads the printing of around 1765, an English book. Whichever name you grew up with, the rhyme is often played as a clapping game for two.
Sharing it with children
For a baby, this is a lap rhyme. Sit them facing you and hold their hands in yours. Clap them gently together on “pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake”, pat their palms on your knee for “pat it”, give one palm a soft poke with your finger for “prick it”, then trace the letter on it with a fingertip — their own initial, if you are using it. For “put it in the oven”, lift both their arms high, or tuck the little hands under a blanket and bring them out again, warm and done. Before long a baby who knows the rhyme may hold out both hands as soon as the first line begins.
Older children can play it as a clapping game with a partner. Face each other, clap your own hands, then clap both hands flat against your partner’s, and keep alternating in time with the words. Once that is easy, cross over — right hand to right hand, left to left — and go a little faster each round until someone fumbles.
Swap in names freely: a brother’s, a grandparent’s, the cat’s, with the child choosing the letter. And when there is real baking going on, the rhyme earns its keep. Pat the dough, prick a pastry lid with a fork, scratch an initial into the top, and save the last line for the moment the tray goes into the oven.
Extra verses to sing
These verses aren’t traditional — they’re ours. Sing them when the cake is done and someone is asking for more.
Pat-a-bun, pat-a-bun, baker’s man,
Bake me a bun as fast as you can;
Roll it and twist it and dust it with flour,
And put it in the oven for half of an hour.
Pat-a-pie, pat-a-pie, baker’s man,
Fill me a pie as full as you can;
Pile it with apples and cover it tight,
And we’ll eat it all up by the fire tonight.