It’s a “standing head.” That means a headline you can just let
“stand,” or stay set in type, because it gets used over and over
again. “State Rep Arrested for DUI.” “Newborn Discovered in
Dumpster.” “Man Rediscovers Gift Fruitcake From 1962.”
The last story, dated April 18 by AP, tells how a man discovered
a 40-year-old fruitcake in his mother’s attic. “(Lance) Nesta’s two
aunts sent him the fruitcake in November, 1962, while he was
stationed in Alaska with the Army… As best he can remember, he
packed the cake with the rest of his belongings and shipped it home
to Waukesha when he left the military a few years later…His mom
had given him advance warning of the fruitcake back in 1962.”
That’s the fruitcake in the news. There is also the fruitcake as
staple of seasonal comedy. Every Christmas, comedians tell “eternal
fruitcake” jokes — the idea being that fruitcakes are so awful,
people recycle them as gifts over and over again till someone
finally throws them away.
As Dave Barry puts it, “Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the
Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them.”
The fruitcake continues to suffer in the age of cyberspace. Type
“fruitcake jokes” into Google, and, among hundreds of other entries
you find “Things to do with a fruitcake: Paint a few white and
place them outside on the grass so people won’t park on your lawn.
Donate to the local airport for use as airliner wheel blocks.” And
so forth.
MY MOTHER MADE FRUITCAKES, and they were terrific. She used to mail
one or two to me when I was away at college, and I always kept
them, carefully wrapped up in a moist towel, to take a slice off
now and then. My roommates and friends seemed to like it, too,
except for the guy who said it was just too goyische even to
taste.
I called Mom to ask her about the three recipes she used and
where they came from. One started from a base of ground pork, one
from double-strength brewed coffee, and one from applesauce. She
did not, as I suspected she might, learn to cook them from her
mother or from any family friend renowned as a cook.
“I just looked up the recipes myself,” Mom said. “One came from
a cookbook I got as a wedding present, the Tuckaback Circle of the
Methodist Church in Sioux Falls.” One of the others came from
Fannie Farmer. As The Joy of Cooking reminds us,
“Fruitcakes are fundamentally butter cakes (i.e., no different in
basic form from ginger cake, spice cake, or pound cake) with just
enough batter to bind the fruit.”
The Joy of Cooking’s recipe for Dark Fruitcake calls
for the typical Christmassy spices of nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice,
and cloves, two and a half pounds of currants, a pound of brown
sugar, and 15 eggs — yes, fruitcakes are heavy; this recipe yield
is described as “two…loaves, about 12 pounds.”
Apple pies are heavy, too. Why do fruitcakes get a bad rap?
I don’t think many people make them anymore, and maybe those
that do aren’t very good cooks. So the fruitcakes people receive as
gifts at Christmas time are either poorly made at home or come from
commercial suppliers. I haven’t found a commercial fruitcake that I
like, either. Fruitcakes belong, as well, to a class of foods that
has fallen out of favor with the modern palate, including plum
pudding and mince pie. On top of that, it’s unlikely that most
people nowadays take the trouble to keep the cakes as moist as they
should be, veritably sweating. A dry fruitcake really ought to be
remoistened. You might follow the Joy of Cooking
instruction to “bury the liquor soaked cake in powdered sugar” for
long storage.
MORE IMPORTANT, THE WHOLE GENEROUS SYMBOL of a fruitcake doesn’t
mean much these days. When my mother made her batch of fruitcakes
as holiday gifts, she was doing the most she could afford to do for
her relatives and friends. She and my Dad had literally no extra
money through the first years of their married life.
“I remember we had to buy a bottle of milk,” she told me once.
“We counted out our pennies, and then we walked to the store. Your
Dad found a quarter, so he could buy a pack of cigarettes.”
We have long forgotten her generation and the generation before,
the one that soldiered through the Great Depression. My grandmother
remembered it all too well, and in her retirement years, when she
got a Social Security pension of about $38 a month, she used to
say, “I try and try to live on a dollar a day, and I just can’t do
it.” As well, for all that time, you simply could not buy some
things in the winter: citrus fruit, pineapple, bananas.
From this background arrived the fruitcake, the poor man’s gift
of the Magi. These traditional riches of eggs, fruit, and butter in
a cake almost literally substituted for a king’s gold. Heavy?
Ageless? What else could it be?
I think briefly of making a batch, and then decide not to. My
family wouldn’t eat it, and I would be left preserving the cakes
under port-soaked cloth, taking off a slice now and then through
eternity.
