Away, Away With Rum by Gum

My wife is a night shift nurse, and the last thing she needs after a tough shift is to get home and face cooking a holiday meal. So I am in charge of all holiday cooking. I don’t do anything too fancy. Turkey on Thanksgiving, a roast beef on Christmas, and a pork loin on New Year’s. Some family holiday tradition gets thrown in here and there. In my family, you never eat a fowl ( chicken or turkey) on New Year’s. The tradition has it that fowls scratch for their meal, and if you eat them at the beginning of the New Year, you’ll be scratching for money all year.

Gingerbread

So the main meals are pretty standard, but then there are the holiday special foods. This year, we are planning a gingerbread house event for the family. It’s fun to watch a kind of lopsided gingerbread house transform into a mini palace of candy and decorations. I get to bake the gingerbread and then sit back and take photos.

Poppyseed Bread

Next on the agenda is the holiday Hungarian poppyseed bread. This was my Hungarian grandmother’s specialty. She never taught anyone how to make it, and when she died, it was thought that the tradition died with her. In place of the poppyseed bread, the family debated how they thought it was made. After years of fruitless debate, I decided to experiment. My early efforts were filled with, “No, not this, it’s too much like cake,” or” The filling is off!” At last, with the internet, I was able to comb through recipes and combine methods until I got, ” That’s It!!!” So, once again, the family gets to enjoy the Hungarian Poppyseed bread.

Fruitcakes

The final item is our rum-soaked fruitcakes. I do not mean those nasty, dry as old bones, crack your teeth, excuses for fruitcake. Mine is rich, moist, and tasty. I’ve been baking them since the last time Bell Bottom trousers were popular, and I was a fresh sprig just returned from the Boreal reaches of the Northern Coast…OK, enough hyperbole… about fifty-three years. During that time, I have fine-tuned my efforts. This year, I baked 18 small cakes. After baking, they are wrapped in muslin and receive a baptism in rum. Carefully set aside to “marinate,” I open the first one on Thanksgiving to see how the marination is going. Rum is added as needed.

A word of warning about the fruitcake. I jokingly describe it as our “Don’t eat and drive fruitcake.” I doubt that that much alcohol remains in the cake after a few weeks of marination, but I recall that line from the old song Away,Away with Rum:

“Away, away with rum by Gum, with rum by gum. With rum by Gum, with rum by gum…Oh, can you imagine a sorrier sight than a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight!”

Well, if you visit me during the holidays, you’ve been warned, and as we used to say when I wore bell-bottoms, “Take due notice thereof, and govern yourselves accordingly.”