Ah, that dreaded holiday tradition – the annual delivery of
the Fruit Cake. Johnny Carson joked that there was really only one fruit cake
ever made and we have been passing it round for centuries. Actually and
according to Wikipedia, “the earliest recipe from ancient Rome
Fruit cakes soon proliferated all over Europe .
Recipes varied greatly in different countries throughout the ages, depending on
the available ingredients as well as (in some instances) church regulations
forbidding the use of butter, regarding the observance of fast. Pope Innocent
VIII (1432–1492) finally granted the use of butter, in a written permission
known as the ‘Butter Letter' or Butterbrief in 1490, giving permission to
Saxony to use milk and butter in the North German Stollen fruit cakes. Starting
in the 16th century, sugar from the American Colonies (and the discovery that
high concentrations of sugar could preserve fruits) created an excess of
candied fruit, thus making fruit cakes more affordable and popular.” That’s
probably more knowledge about fruit cakes than most ever care to know. One last
fact, if a fruit cake contains spirits, it has a shelf live of years. I think
I’ve seen some that probably are decades old.
I have always been a bit of an odd duck so when I say that I
actually like good fruit cake I guess it fits. My mother and grandmother always
started making fruit cakes on October 1st. They followed a family
recipe that had been passed down the family for at least 10 generations. My
folks fruit cakes were good but no more appreciated as gifts then anymore than
they usually are today. Non the less, there was always the exchange between
neighbors of the good old fruit cake. By the way, the only fruit cake we ever
ate was mom’s.
However, one year my father came
home lugging the biggest fruitcake I’d ever seen. After a little discussion, we
decided we’d leave it in the pantry for a year and see what happened. In the
end, nothing happened. We opened the fruitcake a year later, sliced it up and
gave it a try. It looked just like it did the previous year. It didn’t taste
one whit better or worse than a “fresh” fruitcake. As I recall, that was the
year dad stopped trying to be polite and began tossing out any fruitcake that
came through the door. Under normal circumstances, tossing food wasn’t allowed
in our house, but as my ever-reasonable father pointed out, fruitcake doesn’t
meet any of the normal criteria for food.
You would think that in our day
and age, that dreaded fruit cake tradition would have died a merciful death. As
we all know, that wasn’t the case. I think things have even become worse. The
dreaded fruit cake has taken on a new life and purpose. Across the United States
Today, The Great Fruitcake Toss
has become a Chamber of Commerce event in Manitou
Springs , Colorado
Many people consider the small
town of Claxton , Georgia
to be the fruitcake capital of the U.S.A.
I did some research and found
the average commercially produced fruit cake weights about 2 pounds and sells
for around $4.00 to $5.00 each. There are more expensive ones out there but
just using these using those figures, that means that at least 2,600,000 fruit
cakes are commercially produced each year. Add to that those that are homemade
and you have one big bunch of fruit cakes.
Think about this for a moment. Since
fruit cake’s almost never go bad and if you had 2,600,000 fruit cakes at your
disposal, you could build your own fruit cake house – a big one at that.
