I never understood the aversion to fruitcake until someone sent me one of those clunkers that the humorist Russell Baker said he deplored, dating from a Christmas dinner when a small piece he dropped shattered his right foot. The offending object "had been in my grandmother's possession since 1880," he joked in his 1983 essay "Fruitcakes Are Forever." "Fruitcake is the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom."
What gives it a bad rap is the reliance, especially by commercial bakeries, on glacéed fruits, those sugar-embalmed specimens that no longer have a whiff of fruit in them. They’re fine if you want your holiday dessert to glow like a Christmas tree, but they're all wrong if it's flavor you are after. Good fruitcake is another story, one that evokes Christmas probably more than any other sweet. Imagine capturing the essence of the Sicilian wine grape Zibibbo, Montagnoli figs and Montmorency cherries in one bite: The results can be intoxicating. If the fruit tastes good, well, then, the cake will taste good, too. As the Italians say, "Good with good makes good."
A Taste of Tradition
As it happens, I cut my teeth on English fruitcake. Properly made, it is a lovely affair -- ambrosial, aromatic and dense like its cousin plum pudding, sans suet. Those who have the patience for cutting up all the fruits and lining the pans properly to prevent the batter from sticking will find it well worth doing once a year -- not least because it has a certain romance to it, like English leather, a vintage Rolls or aged Port. It has a patina. I adore its rich and spicy flavors, moist crumb and liquorous cheer. I love the cool glaze that frosts the surface and melts the moment it greets my warm tongue.
There is simply nothing more evocative of the winter holidays, especially those I spent living in Scotland when we left our doors open and neighbors stopped by with gifts of homemade baked goods or marmalades and stayed for a tipple and a chat. My landlord, who produced really good British fare by faithfully following the recipes in "Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management," made an especially grand version that was covered with a layer of almond paste and, over that, royal icing. The cake was baked in August and left to cure under rum-soaked wraps until the time came to decorate it for Christmas. It recalled for me the flavors of my mother’s gâteau d’uva, described in Ada Boni's Italian classic "Il Talismano della Felicità," the only cookbook in our house, as "a famous English fruitcake."
The Key Ingredients
I was compelled to make my mother's cake to see how it would compare to the British original. The recipe she sent me listed dried fruit. But what kind? Living as I did then on paltry wages, I couldn't make a long-distance call to New York for more details -- I didn't even have a phone -- but I was sure she avoided the embalmed sort. I went to a pricey greengrocer on Edinburgh’s Princes Street where the Queen's steward was reputed to order fruits when the royals were in residence. There, I spent a week's wages on the best dried fruits I could find. The result? My fruitcake exceeded even my mother's.
Fruitcakes fall into three basic categories: dark, light and white, depending upon the proportion of dark sugar or molasses used to sweeten the cake. This version is dark. Old English recipes call for brandy, but I use a combination of vermouth, sherry and brandy. Any of them will do -- as will the Scots' preference, whiskey, or Gran Marnier, as Carole Walter, author of the classic "Great Cakes" (Ballantine Books), suggests.
Perhaps the most important ingredient, however, is time. When I asked Walter how long fruitcake should age, she said, "Making fruitcake well before Christmas makes it easier to slice because, as the cake matures, the ingredients hold together better." But don't worry: Susan Purdy, author of the definitive "A Piece of Cake" (Atheneum), offered tips, which you will find in the recipe, for accelerating the process, so you can make the cake in time to shatter your holiday crowd's expectations (rather than their feet).
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