Fruitcakes
by Sandra Lee Smith
Christmas Fruitcake
There were a lot to choose from. A fruitcake with chocolate in it? With pecans and nuts? With or without citron? And whose recipe should I choose? As you can imagine, this fruitcake making can be serious business. Deciding which recipe to follow is just the first step. Finally, I choose a recipe called Holiday Fruitcake which appeared in the October 25, 1990 Los Angeles Times food section. I also had all of the right ingredients on hand to make the Holiday Fruitcake. This is always a step in the right direction. I grew up in a household where I had free reign in the kitchen, allowed to cook or bake anything I wanted, the only criteria being, all of the ingredients had to be available in the pantry. I never, as a child, asked my mother to buy a special ingredient for my cookie baking binges, nor did we ever make special forays to the corner grocery store for special items. One sunny afternoon, I put Bob to work shelling pecans and chopping almonds. He also chopped dried apricots ad dates. Meanwhile, I was greasing loaf pans, creaming butter and sugars and making sure no one had tapped into the bottle of Grand Mariner. (Other than myself, of course). It took the largest bowl in the house to get it all mixed and we took turns trying to stir the big wooden spoon in this muck of fruits and nuts. As we stirred, I explained that taking a turn at stirring the fruitcake is good luck, a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Eventually, the lumpy batter all ended up in four loaf pans and I hovered cautiously over their kitchen stove, throughout the baking process. When the cakes were finally baked, removed from the pans and cooling racks, we congratulated ourselves and celebrated with maybe just a teeny bit of Grand Mariner. When the cakes were completely cold, they were wrapped in cheese cloth and then Reynolds Wrap, placed in Tupperware containers and stored in the refrigerator. Packing the fruitcakes into Tupperware to go into the refrigerator reminded me of the time I had a large, primarily nut, fruitcake aging in he refrigerator for a year-this was back in the days when I was married and raising four sons. I had taken the children to Ohio to visit my parents for the summer. When we returned, I noticed an empty space in the refrigerator. “Where,” I asked Jim, “is the fruitcake I was asking?” “Oh,” he said, “I didn't know what it was so I threw it out.” Since Bob never discards anything, I knew this would never happen again. In December,we will re-wrap them in cellophane and give them only to very special people. (Translation: people who do actually like fruitcake.) There is a rumor going around that there is only one fruitcake in the world, which gets passed around from person to person every year. It may surprise you to know, there is such a thing as a really good fruitcake. And with all the different kinds of dried fruits available nowadays, you can make a fruitcake to suit the taste of your own family. Read more of Sandy's foodie chatter at: Sandy's Chatter! |
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