The most traditional Christmas pudding in Scotland is, of course, the clootie dumpling, which is boiled in a cloth (the cloot). There there is its English cousin, the Christmas pudding, which is steamed. And then there are Dundee Cake and Black Bun. But there is also a dark cake stuffed with a large variety of dried and candied fruit and almonds, steeped in brandy, covered in a sheet of marzipan and a blanket of white icing. This is what my family means when we talk about fruitcake or, rather, the fruitcake.
Christmas fruitcake is such a widespread tradition in once-British colonies that it has become a cliché there, the butt of jokes. It has not kept up with contemporary tastes, quite clearly, or else chocolate would be among the ingredients. It is heavy, boozy, sweet, and allegedly unpopular–despite themillions sold every year. It famously keeps for decades, and it is the only cake I know of that is supposed to be left uneaten for a month at least–two months if you remember by October.
Like most immigrants, I brought my family food traditions when I moved to Britain, and it was some years before I stopped making every Christmas recipe. Lacking full-time employment, I felt that I was letting down the side if I didn’t produce half a dozen varieties of cookies, the Fruitcake, the Chelsea Bun, the “Alaskan” Trifle, the Autumn Vegetable Soup, the Turkey, the Potatoes, the Curried Carrots, and the Green Beans with Red Peppers and Almonds. However, in recent years I have been too busy for extreme baking, and the Fruitcake fell by the way.
This year, however, my mother mentioned that–as she and my father are coming to Scotland for Christmas–she isn’t going to make the Fruitcake this year. I correctly heard the unspoken assumption and started collecting the ingredients myself. And none too soon! First, newborn Fruitcake must be swaddled in brandy-soaked muslin for at least six weeks, and second, when I went to Tesco I discovered that all the smallest flasks of Napoleon brandy had been bought. It is a great joy to me to live in my ancestral nation, but when thousands of my neighbours are also making my traditional foodstuffs, ingredients tend to run short. (I have already bought this year’s tinfoil turkey pan.)
As a matter of fact, it is easy to make the Fruitcake if you have all your ingredients and utensils together and leave yourself a whole weekend to complete the various tasks on time. The sultanas, raisins and currants have to be washed, dried and soaked in brandy overnight. New unbleached muslin (if needed) must be purchased (£3/m at Edinburgh Fabrics), washed and dried. The massive pan (a ring tin, in my case) must be found, washed, dried and lined with greased brown paper. (How safe contemporary brown paper is, is a question I have not hitherto considered.) The measuring, adding and mixing of all ingredients can take up to 50 minutes, and the baking time is 3.5 hours. The cake can cool in its tin overnight and be wrapped up in brandy-soaked muslin the next morning. It can then be popped into a cake tin. After six weeks, it is clothed in a block of marzipan banged and rolled flat and a coating of white glacé icing.
What do fruitcake and social dancing have in common? The most obvious point is that they are both traditional, handed down by families within a cultural context. My Scottish-Canadian grandparents (both born before WWI ended) learned to dance, and my mother has fond memories of New Year’s Eve ceilidhs.(My Polish goddaughter, age 5, is already learning Polish folk dancing from her mother.) Both cake and dancing also need preparation–buying, washing, soaking in brandy on the one hand, and learning both the local etiquette and the steps on the other. And, of course, both improve with time. As I never cease to harp, dancing is a developed skill. Yes, babies and cockatoos bounce up and down to music, but social dancing is learned, and learning takes time. If I take out my fruitcake in exactly 6 weeks, it will have spent 1,008 hours in its brandy wrappings. Imagine how good we would all be a dancing after a thousand hours of instruction and practice!
