Fruitcake with marzipan elephants
I had a reader take issue with me regarding fruitcakes (check out my last post). I made some throwaway remark that led my reader to think I was anti-fruitcake, which is not the case at all. I am only against some fruitcakes, generally the kind it's possible to buy on the open fruitcake market.
Since I have the attention-span of a fruit fly myself, I decided to put off my next scathing post about The Holiday, and turned my attention to all things fruitcakish. My photo above is what you get if you keyboard weird fruitcakes into Google Images. If my art history serves, I believe the image above is a baked representation of the Sumerian world view: a flat earth, supported by four elephants, supported in turn by a large turtle. The turtle part is made out of fruitcake. While I applaud the ambition, I can tell with a single assessing glance that this is not a particularly good fruitcake either. Ambition without tastiness will only produce cardboard fruitcakes and the Bush administration.
Fruitcakes, like fine horseflesh and purty women, can be judged by eyeballing them. First, a decent fruitcake is black, black, black. This deep richness is created by packing raisins, candied fruit, chopped pecans, suet, and a very slight amount of fruitcake dough into the smallest ring-style baking pan that will hold it. Once it is baked, the cake should be stabbed many, many times with an icepick, and half a fifth of Jack Daniels poured over it. Next, the cake is wrapped carefully in waxed paper, put into an airtight round tin, and cured for the next five months. This necessitates your cranking up any fruitcake operations the August before, so that by December your fruitcakes have evolved into the required inky shade. What you will have produced is the infamous Texas Black Fruitcake. A single slice, for strong men only, measures 1/2" thick. Held to the light, Texas Black Fruitcake looks like a chunk of fine stained glass. A single ten pounder will carry you from Christmas right up to next year's Thanksgiving.
I was raised on Texas Black Fruitcake, and it wasn't until some time in grade school that I encountered the doughy, loaf shaped attrocity, gently sprinkled through with red and green candied somethings masquerading as a fruitcake. Occasionally, to my gagging horror, coconut was involved. Luckily, my lunchbox portion of Texas Black Fruitcake was never coveted either, possibly because my little companions mistook it for meatloaf.
Oddly, I've never encountered the Texas Black Fruitcake anywhere but Oklahoma, made by my own grandmother's clever hands. Since she shooed everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked and, when asked for recipes, wrote down blatant lies doomed for failure ("add 1/2 cup walnut shells"), I was amazed when my mother attempted it and came up with a remarkably close version. I've never tried to conjure up the recipe myself. Possibly I fear a reverse Proustian Madeleine experience, in which I eat something that not only doesn't conjur up a remembrance-of-things-past but forces me to denounce my childhood instead.
No, here in Texas I've only nibbled at yellow-cake monstrosities, managing to slip the remains in a large plant nearby. I don't mourn the by-gone Texas Black Fruitcake, because I no longer get all gooey at the thought of The Holiday. I'll be exploring my remorselessness in the next few posts.
Since I have the attention-span of a fruit fly myself, I decided to put off my next scathing post about The Holiday, and turned my attention to all things fruitcakish. My photo above is what you get if you keyboard weird fruitcakes into Google Images. If my art history serves, I believe the image above is a baked representation of the Sumerian world view: a flat earth, supported by four elephants, supported in turn by a large turtle. The turtle part is made out of fruitcake. While I applaud the ambition, I can tell with a single assessing glance that this is not a particularly good fruitcake either. Ambition without tastiness will only produce cardboard fruitcakes and the Bush administration.
Fruitcakes, like fine horseflesh and purty women, can be judged by eyeballing them. First, a decent fruitcake is black, black, black. This deep richness is created by packing raisins, candied fruit, chopped pecans, suet, and a very slight amount of fruitcake dough into the smallest ring-style baking pan that will hold it. Once it is baked, the cake should be stabbed many, many times with an icepick, and half a fifth of Jack Daniels poured over it. Next, the cake is wrapped carefully in waxed paper, put into an airtight round tin, and cured for the next five months. This necessitates your cranking up any fruitcake operations the August before, so that by December your fruitcakes have evolved into the required inky shade. What you will have produced is the infamous Texas Black Fruitcake. A single slice, for strong men only, measures 1/2" thick. Held to the light, Texas Black Fruitcake looks like a chunk of fine stained glass. A single ten pounder will carry you from Christmas right up to next year's Thanksgiving.
I was raised on Texas Black Fruitcake, and it wasn't until some time in grade school that I encountered the doughy, loaf shaped attrocity, gently sprinkled through with red and green candied somethings masquerading as a fruitcake. Occasionally, to my gagging horror, coconut was involved. Luckily, my lunchbox portion of Texas Black Fruitcake was never coveted either, possibly because my little companions mistook it for meatloaf.
Oddly, I've never encountered the Texas Black Fruitcake anywhere but Oklahoma, made by my own grandmother's clever hands. Since she shooed everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked and, when asked for recipes, wrote down blatant lies doomed for failure ("add 1/2 cup walnut shells"), I was amazed when my mother attempted it and came up with a remarkably close version. I've never tried to conjure up the recipe myself. Possibly I fear a reverse Proustian Madeleine experience, in which I eat something that not only doesn't conjur up a remembrance-of-things-past but forces me to denounce my childhood instead.
No, here in Texas I've only nibbled at yellow-cake monstrosities, managing to slip the remains in a large plant nearby. I don't mourn the by-gone Texas Black Fruitcake, because I no longer get all gooey at the thought of The Holiday. I'll be exploring my remorselessness in the next few posts.
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