9 Fun Facts About Fruitcake

1THE PRICE OF SUGAR MIGHT HAVE AFFECTED ITS UBIQUITY

It wasn’t until the 16th century that fruitcake really started to become a thing. In his 2002 article “A Short History of Fruitcake” for the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema blamed “the fruitcake plague” on inexpensive sugar that came to Europe from the colonies in the 1500s. “Some goon discovered that fruit could be preserved by soaking it in successively greater concentrations of sugar, intensifying color and flavor,” Sietsema wrote. “…Having so much sugar-laced fruit engendered the need to dispose of it in some way—thus the fruitcake. By the early 19th century, the typical recipe was heavy as lead with citrus peel, pineapples, plums, dates, pears, and cherries.”

2 IT’S A BAKED GOOD WITH SOME SERIOUS HEFT.

Sietsema might have been exaggerating just a bit when he compared fruitcake to lead. However, according to Harper’s Index, the ratio of the density of the average fruitcake to the density of mahogany is 1:1.

Another fun Harper’s Index fruitcake fact: “Age, in years, of a piece of wedding fruitcake on display at the Grover Cleveland Birthplace, in Caldwell, New Jersey: 106.”

3TRUMAN CAPOTE TURNED A FRUITCAKE-BAKING EXPEDITION INTO FINE SHORT FICTION

In December 1956, Capote published a short story in Mademoiselle magazine titled “A Christmas Memory” about two cousins—the narrator, a 7-year-old referred to as “Buddy,” and the other a charmingly eccentric woman in her sixties. The story begins with the woman looking out the window and announcing one early-winter morning, “Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!” “A Christmas Memory” has become a cherished holiday tale, and is often included in Christmas-story anthologies.

After determining that it’s fruitcake weather, the two cousins then gather the necessary ingredients: “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavourings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.” Buddy then explains that they bake the fruitcakes for “friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we’ve met maybe once, perhaps not at all.” The intended fruitcake recipients include some Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured in the cousins’ Alabama town the winter past, the driver of the 6 o’clock bus from Mobile, a California couple whose car broke down outside the cousins’ house one afternoon, and President Roosevelt.

4SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, FRUITCAKE BECAME A HOLIDAY JOKE

Though, like the astronauts, many fruitcake recipients have chosen to re-gift the confection throughout the ages, Johnny Carson is widely credited with giving the baked good a bad rap in December 1985 when he quipped on The Tonight Show, “The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.”

5THERE IS (ALLEGEDLY) SUCH A THING AS TASTY FRUITCAKE

In 1989, just a few short years after Johnny Carson’s infamous dis, Dena Klein wrote a lengthy article for the New York Times titled “Just in Time, a Defense of Fruitcake.” In it, she quotes Seth Greenberg, who worked in his family bakery, William Greenberg Jr. Desserts in Manhattan, as saying that the problem with fruitcake is not the cake itself but instead the too-dry, sickeningly sweet neon fruit that too many bakers cram into them. Seth insisted that fruitcake made with only the best, properly treated ingredients—brandy, glace cherries, apricots, figs and dates—is heavenly.

In her 2006 Isthmus article “Stop making fun of fruitcake!” Erika Janik echoes Seth Greenberg: “Despite what you see in grocery stores, candied fruits in unnatural colors are not obligatory and should, in my opinion, be avoided. Naturally sweet, dried fruits are the key.”

6THERE’S A LITTLE-KNOWN CONNECTION BETWEEN “THE FRUITCAKE LADY” AND CAPOTE

Rudisill had reason for her particularly passionate feelings about fruitcake. Not long before her standoff with Leno, she had published a part cookbook-part memoir called Fruitcake: Memories of Truman Capote and Sook. Known to Capote as “Aunt Tiny” while he was growing up in Monroeville, Alabama, Rudisill might not have spared little Truman any of the frank, sharp-as-a-tack advice she would become famous for dispensing on The Tonight Show. She also revealed that “A Christmas Memory” wasn’t completely fictional—Capote had shared a close bond with his cousin Sook Faulk, an avid baker of Christmas fruitcake (Rudisill published Sook’s Cookbook in 1989), that was very similar to the friendship between Buddy and the woman who so famously proclaimed “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”

7WHEN BAKING FRUITCAKE, THE HOLY SPIRIT MIGHT BE THE KEY TO CREATING A WINNER

As part of his history of fruitcake for the Village Voice, Robert Sietsema taste-tested several different fruitcakes “using the savor-and-spit technique favored by wine critics.” The best two, he found, were created by monks. He determined the fruitcake sold by the Trappist monks of Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani to be “crumbly and voluptuous.” The competing cake, made by the monks at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, was topped with a honey glaze.

A 2012 Washington Times profile on the Holy Cross Abbey monks states that they sell approximately 10,000 fruitcakes per year. The monks have spent many decades honing a recipe that was originally based on Betty Crocker directives. In addition to cake batter, the monks mix in raisins, pineapple, nuts, cherries, and pieces of lemon and orange, as well as nutmeg, vanilla, cumin and other spice

8OR IT JUST MIGHT BE THE BOOZE

In addition to the monks’ cakes being the most delectable, they were also the most booze-soaked, according to Sietsema. “It’s hard to believe that men of God are busily undermining the sobriety of the populace (including children) by pouring the hard stuff over Christmas cakes,” he wrote. Nonetheless, the Abbey of Gethsemani cakes contained both burgundy wine and Kentucky bourbon. And to the Holy Cross fruitcakes the monks “add a generous measure of fine sherry wine.”

But Truman Capote knew booze was a secret to successful fruitcake baking way back in 1956. After Buddy and his cousin are finished baking the cakes, they discover two inches of whiskey left in the bottle: “The taste of it brings screwed-up expressions and sour shudders. But by and by we begin to sing, the two of us singing different songs simultaneously.”

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