by Judy Schultz
Full disclosure: I’m here to defend that gloriously-rich and much-maligned pleasure, the Christmas fruitcake.
Nigel Slater, a British foodie whose writing I admire, devotes 15 pages in his book The Christmas Chronicles to a chapter called November 25, The Cake. Slater says, “As baking days go, this is as good as it gets,” and he’s right.
It’s not just the cake, but the ritual joys that surround cake day: choosing a recipe (dark or light, tropical or Old English); the hunting and gathering of ingredients; the smell as it bakes on a dark November morning.
I love reading fruitcake recipes in old cookbooks. The Canadian Home Cookbook of 1877 calls it Wedding Cake and requires “one tea-cup of spices.” Marie Nightingale, a distinguished Halifax food writer, collected old fruitcake recipes. One was called Pork Cake, because the first ingredient was a pound of fat salt pork. Then there was Doorstop Cake, apparently a weighty effort from a past Christmas.
My own passion for fruitcake isn’t because of Christmas past. True, I enjoyed cake day with my grandmother and mother for several years, but I’m not sentimental about food. Nostalgia is an over-rated ingredient. Like cinnamon, it’s best in small amounts.
Still, it is the season. Decision time is now.
Dark or light? I do love a dark, boozy, nut- and cherry-studded, peel-speckled, raisin-loaded cake, one with buttery crumbs that stick to my teeth. But in the interest of instant gratification, I choose to bake a light one instead, so we can whack into it as soon as it’s cool enough to cut.
The fruit: As well as the above mentioned, I like to add currants, dates, figs and pineapple. Good fruit is expensive. Prepare to break the bank.
The booze: Brandy or rum is traditional, unless you’re a Scot, in which case it’s whisky, but I love to add a big glug of Galliano, with its natural almond essence, or a sweet golden Tokaj Aszú; masses of fruit and sun in every drop.
The nuts: Walnuts, almonds and pecans. My personal favourite, called Edna’s Cake, also requires coconut.
The fat: Use salted butter, the best you can find. It will shine through in the flavour.
The baking: Tahdah! It’s cake day, and the whole house (okay, a small house) is filled with the warm sweet smell of the baking cake. The wafting-everywhere aroma is the great bonus of cake day.
To ice or not to ice? Ice it if you must, but that snow-white royal icing hardens like cement. If you value your molars, chisel it off before you bite into the cake.
Ageing the cake: Dark cakes beg for ageing; light cakes, not so much. But both cakes will benefit, properly wrapped and stored for anything from several weeks to months. Having just enjoyed two generous pieces of last year’s cake which I found reposing in the back of the basement fridge, I repeat: let it age.
Cutting the cake: Go for short fat slices, with a layer of almond paste on top. Wedges (in the case of a round cake) strike me as a bad idea. Fruitcake is rich and hefty by nature and a proper wedge is always too much of a good thing. If it’s discreetly slender, the edge of the wedge will be too thin and it’ll fall apart before it hits the plate. Round cakes look elegant, but they’re the very devil to cut. I suggest square or rectangular pans.
Truman Capote wrote one of the world’s great short stories, A Christmas Memory, about the ritual baking of Christmas fruitcake “on a coming-of-winter morning in November.” His seven-year-old self and his elderly cousin, a dotty old lady who would be forever young, stole their pecans from a neighbour’s trees and traded a promise-of-cake for bootleg whisky.
It’s a great yarn, available online, read by Capote himself. Treat yourself to a reading. Enjoy it with a piece of fruitcake. Have a Merry Christmas.