|
the dish > Recipes
Fruitcake Redux
A holiday staple redo: No neon green bits! No candied
citron!
By Jeremy Jackson, Special to the Chicago Tribune
For more than 20 years now, it has been generally accepted that
your typical holiday fruitcake is so horrible as to be inedible.
In such an environment, it has become remarkably challenging to
craft a decent joke about fruitcakes. They have all been told.
Fruitcakes, alas, are past the point of being merely
hilarious and are perhaps now in grave danger of fading into irrelevancy.
If we can't eat them and we can't laugh about them, what further
purpose could they serve?
Still, fruitcakes persist. A commercial example purchased
recently at a national-chain drugstore had a lovely decorative tin
that claimed to contain a "premium" fruitcake. That was
promising.
Yet upon opening the lid, the smell of red dye number
40 was so strong it evoked the sensation that a train of chemical
tankers had derailed at the end of the street. The cake's heft was
impressive for its size, and the ingredient list ran 109 words ("wheat
flour" being words 35 and 36).
And what exactly were those neon green bits nestled
into the cake beside the red nubby things and the blobby yellowish
chunkettes and the alien-brainlike translucent cherries? It was
all very disturbing.
As for the taste test, three words: dry, dry and horrible.
Of course, it's not fair to compare a fruitcake made
several states away and who knows how long ago to any decent homemade
fruitcake.
Allegedly, there are good fruitcake recipes out there.
But where?
Sure, fruitcake recipes pop up from time to time in
cookbooks and magazines, but they inevitably have headnotes that
start something like this: "Most fruitcakes are awful, but
this one will convert any nonbeliever." That is total rubbish,
of course.
Please, if you've got a fruitcake recipe that you
and your ilk actually like, then by all means keep using it. (Do
not send it to this newspaper or this writer.) But keep in mind
that your family might be lying about your cake's superiority and
that the reason your dog gets sick every year around the holidays
may be because he's eating a disturbing quantity of fruitcake handed
to him under the table.
For those of us who don't have a good fruitcake recipe,
let's have a fresh go at the whole problem. Let's back up and look
at this situation from afar. Let's question our assumptions.
For example, why must so many fruitcakes be so dense
and sweet and soaked in brandy or rum? Yes, to help preserve it,
OK. Before the invention of refrigeration this was particularly
important. But here's an idea for the modern age: Why do we want
to preserve something we don't like? How about we reduce the cake's
shelf life (or maturation time, if you want to look at it that way)
in order to improve the cake's flavor?
While we're giving fruitcake a makeover, let's eliminate
some of the worst ingredients.
Maraschino or candied cherries? Banned! Red dye, green
dye or any dye? Cast them out into the cold! Candied citron? No
way! Pineapple? Get thee to a nunnery! Golden raisins? Disgusting
stuff, that!
Perhaps another problem with your average fruitcake
is that there's just too much going on, like the baker just ransacked
the pantry and used every possible ingredient. So a bit of simplicity
might help us. Fewer fruits, for example.
And what about the spices like cloves, ginger, nutmeg,
mace, et al., that can transport a fruitcake from the merely annoying
category to the realm of the truly nauseating? Too many spices plus
too many dried fruits equals badness, badness everywhere and nary
a crumb to eat.
OK, and while we're at it, how about a cake that's
easy to make? No four-hour baking time. No sprinkling the cake with
brandy every day for six weeks before it's ready. How about a cake
that's about as easy to make as your everyday corn bread, and which
can be eaten immediately or kept for about 10 days? Yes!
Yadda, yadda, yadda, one week and $60 worth of dried
fruit and nuts later, and I humbly submit the following recipe,
one possible solution to the fruitcake problem. No neon green bits,
no density problem, no spices. Just the right amount of dried fruit,
some lovely walnuts and a nice touch of brandy and vanilla.
We'll know if the recipe is a true success if people
start baking it at other times of the year than the holidays.
Let the fruitcake jokes fade away ...
Less disturbing fruitcake
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Resting time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Cooling time: 30 minutes
Servings: Two 9-by-5-inch loaves (about 36 slices)
Ingredients:
1 cup brandy
1/2 cup water
1 vanilla bean, split, scraped, seeds reserved
1 cup dried tart cherries
2/3 cup dried blueberries
Grated zest of each: 1 orange, 1 lemon
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, melted
5 eggs
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 1/4 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp.s baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 1/3 cups chopped walnuts
1. Heat the brandy, water, vanilla bean and scraped
seeds, cherries, blueberries and fruit zests to a simmer in medium
saucepan. Remove from the heat; cover. Let rest 30 minutes. Drain
the fruit, reserving the liquid. Remove the vanilla bean.
2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Beat the oil and melted
butter with a mixer in a large bowl. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Beat in 1/2 cup of the berry poaching liquid (add water to make
1/2 cup, if necessary).
3. Sift the sugar, flour, baking powder and salt in
a medium bowl. Add flour mixture to the wet mixture; beat 2 minutes.
Pour the batter into two buttered and floured 9-by-5-inch loaf pans.
Spoon the poached berry mixture and walnuts on top of the cake batter.
Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes
out clean, about 1 hour, 20 minutes. Let cool in the pan 30 minutes.
Remove from pan; cool completely on a wire rack. The cakes keep
up to a week in a sealed container at room temperature.
Nutrition information per serving (based on 18 slices
per loaf):
194 calories; 42 percent of calories from fat; 9 grams fat; 2 grams
saturated fat; 36 mg. cholesterol; 25 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams
protein; 69 mg. sodium; 2 grams fiber.
--Jeremy Jackson is a novelist and author of "The
Cornbread Book" and "Good Day for a Picnic."
|
