Have Yourself a Natural Christmas

How about baking a fruitcake? (recipe cards included)

I had a long fruitcake date with my mother the day after Thanksgiving.

Making a fruitcake means doing a lot of chopping and measuring and mixing, so there was plenty of time to catch up on hometown gossip. This is the kind of talk I love, because every situation is a potential story. Mama’s stories are especially juicy since she has a police scanner. She hears when there’s a stranger in somebody’s yard or a car accident or somebody collapsed at home. The downfall is that you hear the problem but you almost never hear the windup.

The law had been summoned that Friday morning to a person who wasn’t answering her phone. Mama recognized the address as her friend’s. This friend has been falling a lot, and Mama surmised that she had fallen again.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“I haven’t heard,” Mama said.

She told me that a man "was shot in the county” the Sunday before--no idea if he lived. No idea who. No idea why. A teenager wrecked a four-wheeler and was air-lifted to Savannah, which means they were seriously hurt.

“I don’t think kids should be turned loose on four-wheelers,” I said.

“Neither do I. Those things go way too fast.”

My mother and I decided to use a 100-year-old fruitcake recipe and double it, so there’d be cakes for both of us. The recipe calls for a quart of pecans, which meant two quarts total. Plus it calls for 1 cup blackberry wine. Believe it or not, my dad (who was an absolute teetotaler, like my mother) made some blackberry wine years ago. My mom had a bottle of it in her pantry, so that problem was solved.

My brother came in and decided to taste the wine.

“It doesn’t taste alcoholic,” he said.

“Oh, it’s wine,” my mom said. “When your dad made it, bottles were blowing up in the pantry.”

She and I had to use an enormous stainless steel bowl to get all the ingredients folded together. There was enough batter for two bundt pans and three loaves. The recipe said to bake it at 250 for two hours, which meant a lot more talking time.

Mama told me that my cousin's new poodle pup is still peeing on the floor. And my uncle's better. He had to go into a nursing home because his Alzheimer's was getting really bad. My mom had read the last books I left her, but she wouldn't recommend either of them. “If you just have nothing else to do, at all,” she said, “read them. Other than that, don’t waste your time.”

After two hours the fruitcakes still weren't done. Outside, dusk was coming on, time to feed the horses at home. I live about 25 minutes from my mother. She agreed to take over the fruitcake project, which meant she had to keep checking the cakes with a broom straw until they were done and get them out of the oven.

Yesterday I went back to her house and picked up my share. The fruitcakes came out perfectly. Later today I’ll soak a length of cheesecloth in our local rum, Richland, and stash this away until the Winter Solstice.

Here is the recipe for you:

Notice that Aunt Lettie was using canned fruit in her fruitcake. We skipped that.

My mom doesn’t want her photo taken these days. She thinks she looks old. I think she’s beautiful. I hate the focus on youth. Always have.

If You Want to Use Natural Dried Fruits

I worried some about the sugar and artificial dyes in the candied fruit. On social media I asked friends if they had ever baked a fruitcake with natural dried fruit, the kind that you’d buy in a food coop or at Whole Foods. Many people have. Here are some responses.

This comment from Ellen got the most likes. She dried her own fruit.

Honey, please….

Gotta have those maraschinos.

Some recipes are like poetry.

Allergic. Egad.

Use kitchen scissors.

She had a cool mom.

My friend Lisa Harris has been baking and giving fruitcakes for 40 years. She wrote about it in Thanksgiving to Christmas: A Patchwork of Stories, edited by Dixon Hearne, and you can find the piece on her website here. Lisa shared her recipe, which uses natural dried fruits, and I have crammed it on a recipe card for you.

A Christmas Memory

Folks reminded me about Truman Capote’s short story, “A Christmas Memory,” and I found the full text of it online.