Fruitcake

While the practice of making cakes with dried fruits, honey and nuts may be traced back to ancient times, food historians generally agree that fruitcake (as we know it today) began in the Middle ages. In those days, imported, dried fruits and nuts were very expensive and generally saved for holiday fare. Variations take their name cues from product color: white, golden & black. Japanese Fruit Cake, a favorite of the Southern regional USA, incorporates "exotic" ingredients: coconut and pineapple. What sets fruit cakes apart from their confectionery cousins is being prepared long before they are meant to be enjoyed. Historically, alcohol provided both flavor and natural preservative. Today, that ingredient is no longer necessary and often omitted.

If you are looking for a particular fruit cake recipe (from a specific book, magazine, place or period) let us know. Americans celebrated space missions by making Astronaut fruitcake. Happy to help you track it down! NOTE: Commerical cake recipes are not generally available.

"Fruit cake...a British specialty...The fruit cake as known today cannot date back much beyond the Middle Ages. It was only in the 13th century that dried fruits began to arrive in Britain, from Portugal and the east Mediterranean. Lightly fruited breads were probably more common than anything resembling the modern fruit cake during the Middle Ages. Early versions of the rich fruit cake, such as Scottish Black Bun dating from the Middle Ages, were luxuries for special occasions. Fruit cakes have been used for celebrations since at least the early 18th century when bride cakes and plumb cakes, descended from enriched bread recipes, became cookery standards. The relationship between fruit breads and fruit cakes is obvious in early recipes, such as those given by Eliza Smith [1753] which include yeast...

Making a rich fruit cake in the 18th century was a major undertaking. The ingredients had to be carefully prepared. Fruit was washed, dried, and stoned [taking the pits out] if necessary; sugar, cut from loaves, had to be pounded and sieved; butter washed in water and rinsed in rosewater. Eggs were beaten for a long time, half an hour being commonly directed. Yeast, or barm from fermenting beer, had to be coaxed to life. Finally, the cook had to cope with the temperamental wood-fired baking ovens of that time. No wonder these cakes acquired such mystique..."

---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 321-322)

Caribbean Black Cake?

Our Caribbean cookery sources offer several recipes for fruitcakes, but only one titled [Jamaican] Black Cake." The recipe's headnote states:

"This is a spin on fruitcake...The name comes from the cake's dark color, due mostly to the burnt-sugar coloring found in Caribbean kitchens. The coloring can be made easily...or purchased at a West Indian grocery. Molasses can be substituted with no loss of flavor, although it will make the cake dark brown, not black. The cake usually is served 2 to 3 days after it has been baked....To make the burnt sugar coloring, caralmelize 1/4 cup granulated sugar in a heavy saucepan. Add 1/4 cup boiling water and remove from the heat. Combine thoroughly. The coloring will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator." 

---A Taste of the Tropics: Traditional and Innovative Cooking From the Pacific & Caribbean, Jay Solomon [Crossing Press:Freedom CA] 1991 (p. 120) [NOTE: If you want the entire recipe from this book let us know, happy to send.]

This recipe presumably descends from European culinary traditions introduced to the region in the 18th century. The ingredients and method are almost identical to English Christmas fruit cake.

What about the oldest fruit cake?

This question falls into the realm of "urban legends." The 2002 edition of the Guinness World Book of Records does not include this category. We scoured the Web and several article databases and found plenty of stories touting fruitcake longevity claims. They are all anecdotal, not documented in a scholarly fashion. One of the classic phrases regarding the longevity of this particular food was coined in 1983 by Russell Baker: "Fruitcake is forever."

"Thirty-four years ago, I inherited the family fruitcake. Fruitcake is the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom. It had been in my grandmother's possession since 1880, and she passed it to a niece in 1933. Surprisingly, the niece, who had always seemed to detest me, left it to me in her will....I would have renounced my inheritance except for the sentiment of the thing, for the family fruitcake was the symbol of our family's roots. When my grandmother inherited it, it was already 86 years old, having been baked by her great-grandfather in 1794 as a Christmas gift for President George Washington. Washington, with his high-flown view of ethical standards for Government workers, sent it back with thanks, explaining that he thought it unseemly for Presidents to accept gifts weighing more than 80 pounds, even though they were only eight inches in diameter...There is no doubt...about the fruitcake's great age. Sawing into it six Christmasses ago, I came across a fragment of a 1794 newspaper with an account of the lynching of a real-estate speculator in New York City."

CHRISTMAS GOOSE

"The goose which the Celts had kept for pleasure were probably of the grey leg variety which has remained the principal domestic goose of Britian." (p. 114)..."Goose was in season twice in its life, a young goose in early summer, and the fattened bird at Michaelmas. (p. 121) 

---Food in Britain: From the Stone Age to the Nineteenth Century, C. Anne Wilson [Academy Chicago:Chicago] 1991 "The Christmas bird provided by the familiar "goose club" may be compared with the German Martinmas goose. The more luxurious turkey must be relatively an innovation, for that bird seems not to have been introduced into England until the sixteenth century."

---Christmas: Customs and Traditions, Their History and Significance, Clement A. Miles [Dover Publications:New York] 1976 (p. 284)

"The Martinmas or Michaelmas roast goose is actually the perpetuation of the ceremonies of Celtic Samhain or Hallowe'en and Germanic Yule, originally the first day of the New Year, now our 1st November. Van Gennep, writing on French folklore, reminds us that it was a good occasion for feasting on tender geese that had must been fattened. Originally roast goose was a thank-offering for the harvest that had been gathered in, the Erntedankfest or harvest home, a sacrifice first to the spirit of vegetation, the to the gods of Odin and Thor. The goose, ritually eaten, magically ensured the regeneration in the months to come of nature as she went underground for the winter, precisely parallel to the Greek myth of the abduction of Persephone by the lord of the underworld...The great feasts of Samhain-All Saints' and St. Martin's Day on 11th November were thus rituals uniting the assembled company of the living with the spirits of the dead...During the Renaissance the tradition of eating goose on All Saints' Day was still widely observed..."

---History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell [Barnes and Noble Books: New York] 1992 (p. 352-3)

"Feasting on geese has long been a tradition in the Old World, as is clear from ancient mythology. The prevalence of goose gods in numerous cultures attests to the ritual importance of geese and to the fact that these rituals date back to antiquity...The goose feast that came to characterize holiday celebrations in later times arise as a modern-day derivative of these ancient rites and sacrifices. People in Europe, Central Asia, North America, and North Africa customarily sacrified geese, particularly at the turn of the seasons. Like other migratory fowl, geese appeared and diappeared at crucial times in the yearly cycle, so eating them customairly accompanied ceremonial events in the solar and agricultural year. People have linked geese to the changing seasons for so long that originally the goose served as a sacrifice to the spirit of vegetation, in thanks for the harvest. After the goose was ceremonially killed, participants in the sacrifice feasted on its flesh in a ritual that they believed would ensure the regeneration of the Earth...Goose was served at the Celtic Samhain, or Halloween; the Germanic Yule, originally the first day of the new year; and Michaelmas, the ritual feast of the winter solstice. The Michaelmas feast is probably the most famous goose feast, apart from that at Christmas dinner...Turkeys, native to the New World, were more plentiful than geese during the period of early settlement. American settlers served turkey at Thanksgiving, making it the seasonal feast bird. In much of the Western world today, turkeys have replaced geese also at the Christmas feast; but for all practical purposes, these two birds share the same symbolism. Just as the people of the Old World connected geese to the sun, some of the North American tribes connected turkeys to the sun."

---Nectar and Ambrosia: An Encyclopedia of Food in World Mythology, Tamra Andrews [ABC-CLIO:Santa Barbara CA] 2000 (p. 105-6)

"Martinmas had once all the customary accompaniments of Christmas, ..but gradually, from the time of the Roman occupation of Europe and its later solistial New Year, the majority of those celebrations were moved forward to the later December date. All Souls' Day and Hallowe'en--a time of falling leaves and fire festivals to help the sun's struggle with darkness--have in most countries similarly moved forward much of their old ritual to the Christmas period...In Germany and elsewhere the goose was the recognized Martinmas dish. And in England, as a large and succulent bird, it took its place for a long time as the most popular Christmas dish...The turkey was a gift from the New World. Spanish ships first brought it back from the Aztecs of Mexico to Spain: thence it would have arrived in the Spanish Netherlands and finally it came to prosper in England's Holland of East Anglia where the great turkey farms were started. It arrived in Spain in 1519; and it is said to have been eaten in England in the third decade of that century, though possibly the bird was then confused with the guinea-fowl. When the guinea-fowl, well known to the ancient Romans and Greeks, was rediscovered by the Portuguese in Africa at the beginnning of the sixteenth century, it came to England dubbed as the Turkie-Henne'."

Christmas cookies

Cakes of all shapes and sizes (including smaller items such as cookies) have been part of festive holiday rituals long before Christmas. Ancient cooks prepared sweet baked goods to mark significant occasions. Many of these recipes and ingredients (cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, almonds, dried fruits etc.) were introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages. They were highly prized and quickly incorporated into European baked goods. Christmas cookies, as we know them today, trace their roots to these Medieval European recipes. Dutch and German settlers introduced cookie cutters, decorative molds, and festive holiday decorations to America. German lebkuchen (gingerbread) was probably the first cake/cookie traditionally associated with Christmas. Sugar cookie type recipes descended from English traditions. Did you know Animal crackers began as edible ornaments?

"By the 1500s, Christmas cookies had caught on all over Europe. German families baked up pans of Lebkuchen and buttery Spritz cookies. Papparkakor (spicy ginger and black-pepper delights) were favorites in Sweden; the Norwegians made krumkake (thin lemon and cardamom-scented wafers). The earliest Christmas cookies in America came ashore with the Dutch in the early 1600s."

---"America's Best Holiday Cookies," McCall's [magazine], December 1994 (p. 85)

The flood of cheap imported wares form Germany between 1871 and 1906 when the import laws were changed, inundated our Christmas markets with cooking utensils like...cookie cutters...Unlike homemade counterparts, or local tinsmith's wares, these tools depicted highly stylized images, often frawn from secular themes or...with subjects designed specifically to hang on the Christmas tree. Likewise, recipes appeared in popular cookbooks to better match the demands of such utensils...In a sense, with the advent of inexpensive tin cutters, new emphasis was placed on shape, where in the past, many homemade cookies simply had been square or round. Bells, Christmas trees, camels, crimped wares (cutters with zigzag edges), lilies, Sant Clauses, turkeys, all of these elaborate shapes tended to deemphasize texture and flavor."