England and Fruitcake
Thea is cutting and packaging 80 individual portions of fruitcake for a wedding, so rather than be useful I thought I would share some information about the very strong relationship the English have with this most delicious concoction. (her fruitcake is fantastic! btw)
Giving and receiving fruitcake is a well-established Christmas custom in Britain, founded upon hundreds of years of tradition. There are many varieties – more than we have here in North America – ranging from extremely light loafs to dark, moist, rich and astonishingly heavy blocks of fruity goodness. They are often covered in marzipan and hard white icing, and decorated – snow scenes, holly leaves, snowmen, santas, robins, and occasionally real berries.
Nowadays a fruitcake is received with a pleasant thank-you, but it wasn’t always so mildly received – for many centuries it was a highly-valued and coveted gift, that bestowed much honor on the recipient and implied great largesse on the part of the giver.
Mixing dried fruit with honey, spices, and grain to create a unique and long-lasting concoction is an old idea – the Romans did it, and so did the Crusaders – but the ingredients weren’t available to the Brits, until well after the Normans had taken the country, back in the 13th Century or so. Shipping to and from the continent had become semi-regular, and dried fruit began to arrive from Portugal and the Mediterranean, to the delight of the English upper classes. Most people didn’t have a great deal of variety in their diet (potatoes, grain and occasionally mutton) – the delicous combination of honey, dried fruit, and nuts was exotic and unusual, a complete delight to the nose and palate, wafting the eater into a fantasy of exotic ports and warmer climates.
Giving sweet gifts at New Year’s was an old Roman tradition, which the English maintained after they left. Fruitcakes, enormously hard to make, were highly valued; and anyone who could hope for a Christmas fruitcake waited with greedy, lip-smacking anticipation. Wealthy higher-ups gave a fruitcake to their most important employees as a tangible symbol of their value, leaving less-worthy underlings motivated to strive harder, and maybe someday take a fruitcake of their own home to their families.
Over time, it became easier and cheaper to make fruitcakes, as ingredients became more available. The growth of the British empire ensured a steady stream of molasses, sugar, raisins, prunes, dates, cherries, pecans, walnuts, corn syrup, almonds, lemon, spices, pineapple, apricots and other sweetstuffs. Still labor-intensive, they held their value but became more available to commoners, so much so that the Scottish Baker’s Guild freaked out, and had this law passed against female home bakers:
‘The said day the baxter traid taking to their consideration the great loss sustained by this traid through several women within this town thus working in their own houses plum cake, seid cake, sugar biscuit, and other pastry, and bringing the same to the several bakehouses of the freemen of this traid to be by them fired, and which pastry they thereafter sell and vend through the town, for remeid whereof for the future, the said traid hereby statutes and ordains that no freeman of this traid in time coming shall give the use of his oven for firing the above pastrie so wrocht as aforesaid being for sale, and that under the penalty of ten merks Scots.’ (1) (one merk was about a shilling, making this penalty serious and crippling to the poor offender! and yes, I know Scotland is not England!)
In the late 1700′s a new Christmas tradition arrived – charitably giving fruitcake (then called plum cake, as all dried fruits were called ‘plum’) to groups of impoverished women and children, going from door-to-door singing carols; at which time giving fruitcake became an English holiday tradition.
Adding rum, brandy, or other alcohol took the fruitcake to another level of deliciousness, which inevitably instigated another British tradition: creating laws defining, confining or condemning anything overly pleasurable! Victorian England decided the fruitcake was far too tasty to be anything but ‘sinful’; laws were passed restricting its use. You could consume a fruitcake at the religious holidays of Christmas and Easter, or at such significant times as weddings, funerals, or christenings; any other time was strictly illegal. Queen Victoria is said to have waited a year to eat a fruitcake baked for her birthday, so as to be a model of restraint for her subjects; which may have prompted Charles Dickens to write, ‘a fruitcake is a geological homemade cake’.
Of course, if there is one thing the English enjoy more than passing laws against all things pleasurable, it is breaking those laws. Much like Prohibition in America a century later, it became a common practice to break the law at home; an invitation to a Victorian Tea was often a chance to illicitly indulge in a piece of cake as well. The practice became so common that the laws proscribing cake-eating dates were repealed later in the century.
Somehow during that era a wedding custom emerged, that is occasionally practiced even today, assigning fruitcake almost-mystical properties – by placing a piece of dark fruitcake beneath their pillows, unmarried wedding guests will dream of their future husband or wife! Who knows where or when this idea came from; one must certainly empathize with the countless maids and washer-women toiling the next day over sheets and pillowcases stained with smooshed cake.
Ah, there is so much more to say about fruitcakes, but I have decided just to stick to the topics of the Brits infatuation with them. So musing about Johnny Carson and German stollen, Truman Capote and pannetone, mail-order cakes and the Butter Letter of Pope Innocent VIII, will have to wait for another time.
(reprinted from last June)