This November, it’s fifty or fifty-one years since I started making the family fruitcakes—not under fifty, though. Without going over the process and history, which I’ve done in other posts, I’d like to add that I never imagined that I’d be doing something for fifty years.
When I began making the fruitcakes, I had a strong tendency to drift off target in life. I’d run off and do unrelated things within the next year. It’s why some people get annoyed with me, and others get amused. At one time or another, I’ve worked on fire lines fighting forest fires in Maine, scraped bottom paint off boats in Maine, been an anthropologist, and assisted in surgery. Oh, and then there was the whole folksinging and Pius Itinerant gig.
I find it amusing, but I had a not- friend in graduate school who took personal umbrage at the variety of casual jobs I had worked. It was because all he had ever worked at was being a student.
No, I don’t want to put being a student down. It’s just that only doing one thing in life is not good preparation for the surprises life throws your way. A variety of work is an exceptional preparatory school for surviving when life throws the icky, soft brown stuff at you.
What a wide variety of work experience tends to give you is an appreciation for how other people live. You can relate. It also gives you skills.
Working in a kitchen prepared me for making fruitcake, the family’s homemade bread, and lots of other stuff.
When I started making the fruitcakes, I had never done anything for a long time. All that short-term stuff added up. After all, it enriched me and gave me material for this blog.
How bad is that – I ask you!?
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And something tells me you’re not about to share that fruitcake recipe ere, are you! Bah, humbug. 😉
I started with the recipes in the 1964 Joy of Cooking, but went in my own directions – lots of dates, figs, raisins , walnuts and pecans, and not much of the candied colored stuff. Pretty natural bye and by. After baking I wrap in muslin, and get the rum ready to go. In this batch each cake got an initial dose of 3/4 of a cup of Bacardi spiced rum. between now and Thanksgiving they’ll normally get about the same again. I advise visitors not to eat and drive.
but by the time it is consumed around Christmas, most of the alcohok has flashed off leaving some flavor, and keeping the cakes moist.
That sounds pretty darned good!
It’s like a lot of things, you either really like them or you don’t. Most people develop a distaste for fruitcake because most are so dry, but mine are moist. I’ve been told that fruitcake was developed as a means of preserving the harvest – it was a practical matter, and an emergency food when it was started.
Interesting, and being a durable emergency food makes perfect sense as it’s also very filling!
I love the idea of family fruitcakes! Are they individual portions or one massive cake to be sliced!
The are small cakes individually wrapped in muslin, then gradually instilled with rum so the final product is a nutty and fruity sweet cake. you slice them failry thick because otherwise they break apart.
They sound divine!
Great post & life lesson. Moving and living abroad does that, too 😊
That question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” maybe ought to be changed to “What kinds of things do you want to try when you grow up?”