A traditional Easter Simnel cake
For decades, my mother ordered fruitcakes from the Collin Street Bakery to give to family & friends. The cakes were shipped in cans directly to their customers, so it saved a lot of trouble in Christmas shopping for distant relatives. When that became too expensive, she and my sister started making fruitcake cookies themselves, putting them in tins, and giving them to local friends. It was a labor of love for them, and it was something they really enjoyed.
Citing Wikipedia:
“The earliest recipe from ancient Rome lists pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins that were mixed into barley mash. In the Middle Ages, honey, spices, and preserved fruits were added.
Fruitcakes 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 Stollen fruitcakes.
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 fruitcakes more affordable and popular.”
“The bakery was founded in 1896 by August Wiederman, an immigrant from Wiesbaden, Germany. With the help of local entrepreneur Tom McElwee, the bakery soon outgrew its original building, and required a new one in which the second floor was turned into a hotel. Celebrities such as Enrico Caruso and Will Rogers were sighted at the bakery, and in 1914 the Ringling Brothers Circus passed through town and ordered dozens of fruitcakes as Christmas gifts to be mailed to friends and family across the globe. In this way, the bakery entered the mail-order business. Lee William “L. W.” McNutt, Sr. (1895-1972), Harry Cook, and Bob Rutherford purchased the bakery in 1946 from August Wiederman.”
“In the United States, the fruitcake has become a ridiculed dessert, in part due to the mass-produced inexpensive cakes of questionable age. Some attribute the beginning of this trend with The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. He would joke that there really is only one fruitcake in the world, passed from family to family. After Carson’s death, the tradition continued with “The Fruitcake Lady” (Marie Rudisill), who made appearances on the show and offered her “fruitcake” opinions. In fact, the fruitcake had been a butt of jokes on television programs such as Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show years before The Tonight Show debuted and appears to have first become a vilified confection in the early 20th century, as evidenced by Warner Brothers cartoons.”
As American tastes have evolved, the candied sugar of the cake presented a health issue of too much sugar leading to obesity. Although the mass-produced cakes in the US are alcohol-free, European cakes are heavy on the booze. Personally, I add a little touch of rum; others prefer bourbon. My mother only used rum flavoring in her cookies.
To me, fruitcake brings back many happy memories of Christmas Day festivities when the cake was served with ambrosia. My mother’s birthday was on Christmas Day, and even though she did most of the cooking the entire family pitched in. We ate all day and always had a crowd of people to join us. Last year, I couldn’t find any fruitcake, and I ended up ordering on Amazon some Stollen bread from a bakery in San Diego for which I paid $18. I waited too late to order from the Collin St. or the Claxton Bakeries.
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