When hosting a holiday party, perhaps the best part of having everyone over is the collection of unique treats brought by all your friends and family. However, among the bottles of funky red wine, triple-cream cheese, and slice-and-bake cookies, there’s always one outlier in the group: A fruitcake. Fruitcake is heavy, both physically (one can weigh the same as a newborn), and on the belly (there’s a whole lot of candied fruit in there, plus it’s soaked in liquor). Fruitcake is hard to bite into. Fruitcake can stay edible for years. Seriously, what is fruitcake?
“it will keep at room temperature for 60-90 days”
When taken at face value, fruitcake doesn’t seem that bad. A cake made of dried fruit, nuts, and perhaps a bit of liqueur actually sounds quite good. However, if you’ve ever gnawed at a piece of fruitcake at a holiday shindig, you know there’s a lot more to this cake than its description.
The origin of the fruitcake can be traced to 16th Century Europe, where it was discovered that when soaked in large quantities of sugar, fruit could be preserved. With so much candied fruit hanging around, people crammed their sugared produce with a few other ingredients into molds to make cakes of sort.
Known originally as “plum cake” in England, the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets describes early fruitcake as an incredibly time-consuming bake—the egg whites had to be whipped stiff with a fork, the butter had to be washed, the fruit hand-candied. The cakes then baked in wood-fired ovens that had been previously heated and emptied.
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