Fruitcakes used to be as common as Christmas trees in December. But they seem to have gone out of culinary style. I still get one every year from a friend of mine in Pennsylvania, but he is a die-hard traditionalist who refuses to quit making them. He's down to making only two a year now...one for himself and one for me. I look forward to its arrival...it weighs a ton because he loads it with rum. If you slice one piece you can usually squeeze out a jigger of rum. Now that's what I call fruitcake.
My friend wraps the cake in cheesecloth and selects a nice tin to mail it in. The cheesecloth takes on a rusty look and I keep thinking it is The Shroud of Turin... I keep expecting an image of Jesus to appear. Or at least the Virgin Mary who was supposedly a great fan of fruitcakes.
Scientist thought they found a large fruitcake in King Tut's Tomb, but it turnned out to be a jelly doughnut.
My father's church sold fruitcakes every year for years and years. Claxton Fruitcakes. He was suppose to sell the cakes to raise money but instead he would buy 5 boxes of them and then he gave them away to people intead of selling them. If you were his son, like I was, you would get at least l0 of these babies. They were shaped like big sticks of butter. I tried my best to offer pieces or even whole cakes to people, but no one bit. I could eat one a month so I took to freezing them and breaking them out as the year progressed. They could have used a little rum but since it was a Methodist church that was selling them, rum was a no-no. One summer I used one as fishing bait. The fish didn't bite.
At Christmas I used to buy two round fruitcakes...one large and one small. I would put them on a cake plate, small on top of the other one. Then I would drizzle white icing over them and put a large red candle in the center hole. It made a magnificent centerpiece for the Christmas dessert table, although no one ever cut into the cakes. I got the cakes at the dime store...and whatever happened to the dime stores?? Well, they have Dollar Stores now so maybe they sell fruitcakes.
I should have signed up for The Great Fruitcake Toss they have every January in Colorado. Those people know how to get rid of unwanted fruitcakes...throw them over to Utah.
One of the best teleplays I ever saw was based on Truman Capote's story of making fruitcakes every year with his crazy cousin. They would make one and send to the President of the United States. They had to collect nuts and shell them; get the waxed fruit; go to some old Indian to get some booze to soak the cake in. Then they would wait to get a thank you letter from the President. Sweet story.
I know companies are still making fruitcakes...Assumption Abbey is one of the most famous. And Collins Street Bakery in Texas makes a nutty one that's really delicious And Dancing Deer makes a "harvest" cake that's a more contempory type of fruitcake. But as long as my friend Charlie from Pennsylvania keeps making them, I am set in the fruitcake department. And in the rum department as well.
