Time isn’t on fruit cake’s side, but taste sure is

There are traditions that live on, traditions that fade and traditions that come to an abrupt end.

My great-grandmother’s fruitcake was the latter, a victim of a newer generation without the time to make it or the taste buds to enjoy it.

I don’t know if her recipe was handed down from another generation or if she got it from a cookbook or from a neighbor. After talking to a couple of experts, I’m pretty sure that if it started out as someone else’s, she adapted it to make it her own.

Food historian Sandy Oliver looked it over for me: “Yours is just so different.”

It calls for buttermilk and strawberry jam. Most curiously, it calls for three kinds of raisins, including the enigma of the recipe: “sticky raisins.”

My interest in the recipe was piqued when I interviewed her daughter-in-law, my grandma, more than a decade ago about family recipes.

I have never been enamored of fruitcake, but the quaint tradition of baking fruitcake to give to friends and neighbors at Christmas and the recipe itself – including 10 pounds of fruit – was intriguing.

This year I set out to make it.

Baked and aged

What I learned, mostly from my cousins Tom Bollin and Betty Kammeyer, is that for decades, my great-grandmother Amelia Ermish, of Toledo, Ohio, dutifully baked many – probably a couple dozen – fruitcakes in coffee cans, wrapped them in liquor-soaked cloth to age, and stacked them in metal lard cans that she would open often to check for proper moisture.

She would buy the fruit when it went on sale each fall (fruitcake is not a cheap endeavor). The baking was a daylong ordeal. There were initial discrepancies in my cousins’ versions about what happened next, but they eventually agreed that she probably aged them for about a year.

When they were ready, she wrapped them in tin foil and ribbons. She stopped probably as a result of deteriorating health around 1960 and died four years later at 84.

For much of her life she had little money. If she wanted to give gifts she had to make them – like the wool socks she made for the mailman every year for Christmas.

My great-grandmother raised eight kids, but her surviving grandkids don’t remember anyone attempting the recipe after she died. I didn’t come across it in her recipes – she didn’t really use recipes much anyway. When my grandma, Ruth Ermish, married my grandpa she approached her new mother-in-law for her lemon custard pie recipe – one of my grandpa’s favorites. Amelia didn’t have it written down, so she invited her daughter-in-law to come watch her make it. My grandma wrote as she witnessed Amelia make it.

“She never measured anything,” Betty said. “She always went by sight and feel.”

So it is perhaps shocking that a recipe even exists. I found it in my other great-grandmother’s cookbook (Ruth’s mom). It likely had been passed along at some family gathering when in-laws mixed. Perhaps my grandma’s mom was a recipient of my grandpa’s mom’s fruitcake and liked it enough to ask for the recipe.”

‘Ultimate survival food’

Tom, my cousin, grew up in Amelia’s home along with his mom and dad. If people were mocking fruitcakes back then, they weren’t mocking his grandmother’s.

“She had a lot of old friends and all her old friends loved her fruitcake,” Tom said.

His theory is that fruitcake was ruined by mass production. Stores started selling them, people remembered a grandmother’s fruitcake and bought them. “And then they’d get them and they’d say, ‘Jesus, these are bad.’ ”

Food author Gia Scott, who published the book “Fruitcake!” in 2013, agrees commercial fruitcake has hurt its image. “There’s not enough brandy in the world to make it eatable,” she said.

She adds that people who hate fruitcake might like it if they could pinpoint the ingredient that’s bothering them and eliminate it. For many, she said, it’s citron.

“Fruitcakes don’t have to be doorstops,” Scott said.

Scott said fruitcakes that are aged should set aside at least six weeks, leading to “a more complex flavor.” But traditionally they were aged for as long as my great-grandmother waited for hers.

“Fruitcake made this year was not served until next year or later,” Scott said. “Fruitcake is the ultimate survival food.”

Oliver, the food historian, said the tradition of saving the top of a wedding cake for the couple to eat on their one-year anniversary comes from a time when wedding cake was fruitcake. No freezer needed, thanks in large part to keeping the cake moist with a booze-soaked cloth.

Americans began to lose their taste for certain kinds of desserts like mincemeat and fruitcake in the 1950s and 1960s, in part, Oliver guessed, because of the rise of chocolate’s popularity

Seeded grapes

The question I had throughout my project was the simplest: “What’s a sticky raisin?”

Oliver had the best guess. Since another ingredient is “seedless raisins,” she believes “sticky raisins” likely were an earlier variety of raisins that had been cut open to remove seeds. Today’s seedless grapes became dominant at the dawn of the 20th century, she said.

A little more Internet research leads me to believe the “sticky raisin” in the recipe is a Muscat raisin – which is unlikely to be purchased these days without a special order.

I never met my great-grandmother. But she is revered in my family for successfully raising eight children with no support from her ex-husband, well before divorce became common. To manage this, she had a strict side that her grandkids noticed in the kitchen.

“If she had stuff out to do baking, you better not mess it up,” Betty said. “Let’s put it this way: You would be on the wrong end of the pole.”

But what sticks with my cousins is her kindness. They remember her “big, loud laugh” and how every night after dinner she would sit outside to visit with neighbors.

“She always had a hug for you, and it always felt really good,” Tom said.

Having made her fruitcake and eaten a lot of it, I can’t say the abrupt end of my great grandmother’s fruitcake tradition will be revised, at least not every year.

I have the taste buds for it, just not the time.

Amelia Ermish’s fruitcake

3/4 cup butter

1 1/2 cup granulated sugar

4 eggs

1/2 cup molasses

1/2 cup sour or buttermilk

1 cup strawberry jam

4 1/2 cups flour

1/2 glass whiskey

2 cup nuts or more

2 cups dates or more

1/2 pound figs

2 pounds pineapple

1 pound cherries

1/2 pound fruit mix

1 pound currants

1 pound seedless raisins

1 pound white raisins

1 pound sticky raisins

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cloves

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon allspice

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

Bake in slow oven, 250 degrees, until done, about 1 ½ hours.

Notes: The recipe above is how it’s written.

Below, find some additional instructions, suggested by Bob Lombardi, a Spokane Community College culinary arts instructor and pastry chef, who examined the recipe for me.

Start by soaking the fruit with the whiskey overnight. Mix butter and sugar, add eggs, molasses, buttermilk and jam. Sift the dry ingredients separately. Combine dry and wet ingredients. Blend in nuts. Blend in fruit.

My great-grandma likely used 1-pound coffee cans. I didn’t have those, so I used bread pans. The recipe will fill four or five of those. Baking time will depend largely on the size of your pan. For me, using 9-by-5-inch bread pans, it took more than 2 ½ hours before a toothpick came out clean.

Lombardi said low heat is important for fruitcake, so don’t try to speed it up.

Use 4 or more ounces of whiskey for the “ ½ glass.” The pineapple and cherries should be candied. “Fruit mix” is the mix of citron and cherries you still can buy in the baking aisle of most grocery stores. For “sticky raisins” I used large bulk raisins I found in a bin at Winco and cut them up. Lombardi suggested substituting cut-up dried apricots.