Jamaica Spiced Black Fruitcake (John Ballard)

I have a confession to make. I am a fruitcake lover. Fruitcake jokes strike me as tired gestures of small minds which have run out of meaningful content. 
My love of fruitcake has roots in childhood when on special of occasions beloved family members or close friends broke out a few home-made versions which were served in too-small rationed portions, always leaving me wanting more than I was allowed.

Two such occasions remain fresh in my memory. The first was when I was about eleven years old, visiting with my parents an elderly woman of my grandparents generation one Sunday afternoon. After a little while she invited us to have a taste of her holiday fruitcake. It was so big it must have been from a recipe I'll tell about shortly, but it was by then over half gone, with evidence that it had been taken away a morsel at a time, leaving behind a crumbling ruin. It would never make a good magazine picture but it was delightful to see, a damaged tube cake under an old cotton towel, stained with whatever spirits kept it damp, with a dried up old half an apple or two in the opening of the tube. My Dad said that Gladys Maupin's black fruitcake was better than anyone else's and when she told people what was in it she never seemed to tell the same thing twice. It was so crumbly I at it with my fingers, but either the flavor or the occasion has remained in my memory.

The second was years later when our girls were involved with gymnastics. The last surviving aunt on my mother's side, an avid sports fan in her eighties, lived two hours away where a state-wide meet was being hosted. When we went by her apartment afterward she discretely invited me into her kitchen for a taste of her holiday fruitcake which by then was at least three months old. She had it wrapped carfully and hidden under a drop-leaf table in the kitchen and obviously didn't let anybody have any unless they were worthy in her judgment. I don't recall the cake as much as the occasion and the way it was treated, almost like a religious relic. 

Jamaica Spiced Black Fruitcake Recipe
By : The New York Times Cookbook

• 3 1/4 cups dried currants 
• 2 1/4 cups seedless raisins 
• 2 cups seeded raisins, chopped 
• 1 1/4 cups sliced citron 
• 1 1/2 cups dried figs, chopped 
• 1 cup cooked and drained dried prunes, pitted and chopped 
• 1 1/2 cups blanched whole almonds, toasted and sliced 
• 1 cup chopped, pitted dried dates 
• 1 cup glazed whole cherries, sliced 
• 1/2 cup glazed orange peel, chopped 
• 3 cups dark Jamaica rum 
• 1 cup butter 
• 2 cups dark brown sugar, firmly packed 
• 1 1/2 teaspoons each, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg 
• 5 large eggs 
• 2 cups sifted all-purpose flour 
• 2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Prepare the fruits and almonds and mix well. Stir in the rum and allow to soak one week.

Preheat oven to slow (275 degrees). Soften the butter in a large mixing bowl and gradually blend in the sugar and spices. Beat in two of the eggs. Sift the flour with the baking powder and salt and add one cup to the butter mixture. Beat in the remaining eggs, stir in the rum-soaked fruit, undrained, and add the remaining flour. Mix well.

Line two greased 9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pans with brown or waxed paper and grease the paper lightly. Divide the batter equally between the two pans. Place a large shallow pan of hot water beneath the cake pans in the oven to prevent the cake from drying.

Bake the cake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 2 1/2 hours. Cool in the loaf pans one hour. Remove to a wire rack, remove the paper and let rest until cold.

Wrap in aluminum foil and store in a tightly closed tin box. Moisten occasionally with Jamaican rum. Age at least one month before serving.

What we call cake is not really a cake. American fruitcake is our version of what the Brits call Christmas Pudding. The difference, of course, is that cakes are baked but this product is typically steamed, then dried in a hot oven. 

Now about that first story about a really big fruitcake. We have a family fruitcake recipe that is truly mammoth. I made half a recipe one year and it was enough for two tube pans and two or three loaf pans. When I asked my mother about why is was so large she said it was used for a really big custom-made pan that was passed around the community in Madison County, Kentucky. It was a farm community and everybody had a canning pot big enough for a large number of quart jars. It must have been about two feet in diameter and deep enough for the jars, with a lid that made it into a pressure cooker.

Someone made a giant pan, probably a tube-type (I never saw it), by cutting and welding the pieces at a local repair shop. I don't want to know what the level of heavy metals may have been in the welded seams, but I'm sure just using it once a year helped not getting a toxic dose. Early in the fall the pan would be used by any household that wanted it. It was passed around as community property but had fallen out of use before I was born. 

At this writing I have cut the fruit for this recipe and it fills a gallon jar. It's too close to Christmas for me to soak for a week and rest for three more. But I'm sure there will be plenty left to age when the New Year arrives. I made this recipe about thirty years ago and my memory is that we enjoyed it. In case it doesn't turn out perfect I can always drown it in boiled custard and force myself to eat it anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

Comments

[Ruchira]

John, I am your kindred soul when it comes to fruitcake. I too never understand the jokes about this really nice piece of Christmas confection. My weakness for fruitcake also originated in childhood. We did not celebrate Christmas although the day is observed as a national holiday in India. On New Year's Day however, we always had a big feast to which many friends and relatives were invited. My father, an excellent cook, made dinner and on his way back from work the day before, he would stop by at a bakery (established during the British era) to buy cakes and pastries. There would be several varieties but there was always a fruit cake, a standard 10" round one full of dried fruits and nuts. I loved its sweet and slightly bitter taste. From what I can now recall of that most excellent cake, the Indian bakers probably did not use quite so much rum as the fruit cake I buy every year in the US from a monastery in Kentucky. Also, there was a lot of walnuts along with almonds. Perhaps everything tastes better on a younger palate but I have never tasted any fruitcake that was as delicious as the one my father brought home evey New Year.

[Sujatha]

I like fruitcake too, in small doses like the 2x4 inch slices that used to come individually wrapped in the bakeries of my hometown.
Every Christmas, some of our Christian neighbors would take out a small parade through the neighborhood, lustily yelling out the lyrics to "We wish you a Merry Christmas", with a scraggly teen wearing a red shirt, Santa hat and a cotton wool beard leading it. They would always hand out little fruitcakes to every household that came out to watch the parade.
Yummy treat, and alas, now bygone tradition.
I will most certainly try out the recipe, John, and the custard too!

[John Ballard]

I'm a day into the recipe now. It took a long time to chop and measure all that fruit, plus I couldn't find any currants. I think I may have bought the last box in Cherokee County last year so I put in an additional three cups of dates, candied pineapple and dried mango. This recipe is also expensive compared with our typical food budget.

When I went to the package store to get rum the bottles didn't print clearly how many fluid ounces were in the bottle, so one of the clerks looked at a chart and told me the one I got was twenty-four and some ounces. I was delighted it happened to be exactly what the recipe called for. When I emptied the bottle into the gallon jar with the fruit it seemed to be a lot more than it needed to be, but I figured it would soak up in the dried fruit. (That's what I remember from when I did the recipe about twenty-five years ago.)

Well, this morning I got suspicious. I got the empty bottle, filled it with water and measured it to be well over four cups, easily far too much. So I carefully held the fruit and recovered the excess rum, now wonderfully flavored by all those dried fruits, and funneled it into a nearly-empty brandy bottle which was down to less than an ounce. I now have a wonderful reserve of spiced rum with all those fruit flavors and a taste of brandy waiting for the next bowl of vanilla ice-cream (or, you guessed it, boiled custard!)

Too much on my plate today for more and tomorrow I have an assignment, so making and cooking the cakes will likely be Tuesday. Will keep you posted.

[Jesse]

I really enjoyed this John, thank you. Many years ago, during a stay at my Aunt and Uncle's house, I was privileged enough to try some Jamaican fruitcake. My Uncle was a teacher for deaf children and his job entailed frequent house visits. The house he most liked to visit, was that of a little girl whose West Indian father made the most phenomenal dark fruitcake and who always insisted my Uncle take some home with him. The reverent treatment of the cake you've described immediately resonated. My Uncle had hidden it from the rest of the family and brought it out for us with a kind of grinning exhilaration that a new culinary student might display when holding their first black truffle. He cut two decent slices and added slivers of a really fine salty aged cheddar, then poured us glasses of stout. No exaggeration, it is one of my happiest eating experiences ever. Please keep us updated on how this recipe goes, because I'll have to try it.

Having an English mother exposed me to Christmas pudding early and I love the stuff. The anti-fruitcake thing is really a product of ignorance i think, or exposure to appalling supermarket versions. I once found myself tending bar on Christmas eve and decided I would bring in a pudding that I'd made (my granny's recipe). At midnight, I presented the pudding on the bar, killed the lights, doused it in brandy and flamed it. I then began serving it and of course there was the one guy who said "I don't actually like fruitcake". I explained that he was insulting me and had better try some. Of course he then really liked it and mentioned that he'd never had anything resembling it.

Can anyone come up with any silly unexamined biases in the savory world? Anchovies are the only thing I can think of.

[Ruchira]

Ah, the lowly anchovy! Another jokey food that I love. When sharing a communal pizza with people with disparate tastes, I am okay as long as I can get some anchovy on side to add to my slice.

[John Ballard]

Jesse, your mention of food biases reminds me of a few items that (like fruitcake, maybe) have gone out of favor. When I first started in the cafeteria business we had several menu items that were on the way out. Tomato aspic is the first I recall. It was on the display when I started in the mid-Seventies but sales were slipping and by the end of the decade it was no longer taking up space. Like many other products we still had the recipe on file but those files were almost never purged of obsolete recipes.

I saw recipes to make apple jelly from the peelings of apples left when apples were prepared for pies, for "cookies" which could be made on sheet pans only to be ground up to make cheesecake crusts, sausage made from scratch, Virginia spoon-bread, noodles made from scratch, etc. And we made mayonnaise and buttermilk from scratch until the late Eightes. (To make buttermilk we put five pounds of dry milk powder into five gallons of luke-warm water, whipped it together, poured in a gallon of dairy buttermilk and let it sit at room temperature overnight. Used for cornbread, biscuits and batters for the kitchen -- fried fish, chicken, cutlets, etc.)

Sliced ham was obligatory for Sundays and it was always served with raisin sauce, but the sauce vanished during the early Nineties. Raisin pie was also on the dessert display but that lost favor as well. (I love raisins but apparently they had a public relations failure I never saw.) Which reminds me of mincemeat pie, another seasonal favorite that vanished. Fresh fruit salads were usually displayed with a choice of plain (pineapple juice to keep them moist) or with poppy seed dressing which was delightful but also went the way of raisin sauce for sliced ham. And finally, hot banana pudding was the most popular dessert I ever served but only because I only offered it once a week... but I never see it now because it takes too much trouble to monitor it, getting it off the display when the bananas turn brown or the meringue gets weepy. A great loss, because any that fails the public cosmetics test can still be made into delicious banana muffins... But that's become part of an old retired cafeteria manager's memory file.

Meantime, to update the fruitcake, the two loaf pans came out fine after about three hours of slow cooking in a big pan of shallow water. After the cooled it would have been criminal to wrap them up for a month without a little taste, so with a very sharp slicing knife I cut about an inch and a half off one end and wrapped the rest up to be out of sight, out of mind until Christmas. The sample was cut into finger food chunks which were still very wet and to my surprise still tasted of spirits. But the flavor profile was great. Some of the fruits were still hard despite soaking and cooking. I think the almonds, figs and some of the dried mango may have been harder than I expected, but now, four days later, they seem to be softening.

In the same way that I serve boiled custard in little disposable paper cups, I rather like putting the fruitcake out as finger food instead of cake-type slices. I can't stand to see people either eating more than they want out of a misplaced sense of courtesy, or worse, leaving half a piece to be tossed. I have a higher level of tolerance for ignorance than waste. Besides, any food that takes a lot of time and trouble deserves rationing, no matter how good it might be.

[John Ballard]

Ruchira, I was unable to leave this comment at your farewell message so I'm putting it here. When I saw that title of your yet unpublished post I had a strong suspicion what was about to happen. Actually you are only following a technological sea change that has been going on for some time and I, for one, completely understand. My earlier comment reflecting on the many menu items I once served but are now forgotten turns out to have been something of a prologue to this ending. This now makes three places on the Web that I have carved into a tree or two. I sometimes fantasize that at some distant time curiosity may drive one of my heirs in future generations to make a forensic trip into the past, chasing the rabbit holes found by search engines. Heck, I can already imagine an app for that! I did that with genealogy during my high school days and it was great fun. (I even discovered to their surprise that my parents were fourth cousins who shared a common fourth great-grandmother. That's not a problem since we all have 64 great-great-great-great grandparents and very few of us even know who they all were.) But I digress...

Many thanks for your kind invitation and what has turned out to be a very good visit. Thanks to Facebook and the 3Quarks community we will continue to be in touch. This is a good place for that great line at the end of Casablanca -- I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

http://youtu.be/5kiNJcDG4E0