The first time I tasted fruitcake

Is fruitcake overrated or underrated? It is hard to recall the first time I tasted fruitcake. It is a holiday food item that is omnipresent, appearing seemingly out of nowhere and disappearing as quickly. Does anyone admit to truly loving it?

There is no nostalgic longing for fruitcake. It is not seen as a comfort food nor as highly refined culinary accomplishment. It is dark and archaic harkening back to a time when people have no family memories. This is medieval food.

Fruitcake is what people may have eaten in the renaissance.Perhaps there is ambivalence about loving fruitcake because it reminds us of our primitive roots. It is the reminder that despite our refinement and sophisticated technological adaptations, that we have barely moved beyond the dirt floors of our ancestors. The first time fruitcake was tasted is probably the same as it tastes now.

Fruitcake is a shock to the palate, sweet and bitter, aromatic and sticky. There is nothing else like it. Every time you taste it the sensation is reborn and becomes new again. This is not a taste the memory lingers over or waxes about poignantly or even craves.Fruitcake is the forest potion of a Germanic witch out of fairy tales, overripe fruit mixed with the groundnuts of the forest floor with a hint of pine resin thrown in. Have you ever eaten an acorn as a child? Well I did and there could be an acorn or two in this cake.

That is not to say I dislike fruitcake. I have acquired a sentimental ritual of eating at least one piece toasted with butter and a cup of strong black tea mixed with milk and sugar. It calms me and centers me in reality during those electrified bright days of the holiday season when we are all on sensory overload. Fruitcake is like the iron weight of food anchoring down the colorful bunch of bobbing balloon of holiday sweets.

There is a new breed of fruitcakes with lighter ingredients intended to enhance the palatability and image of fruitcake.I am not referring to this new species. I am referring to the fruitcake of old, the kind called "large dark fruit cake in the 1959 Farm Journal's Cookbook" or "fruitcake, dark" in the 1950 Mennonite Community Cookbook. These are the cakes heavy with molasses or brown sugar, nuts, the candies fruit or peel of cherries, dates, citron, orange and lemon. These cakes always have nutmeg, cloves and mace the spices used in medieval items used to mask foul food odors. There is one Maine recipe that uses three pounds of raisins. These are cakes that are baked and stored, well wrapped, in cool dark places. These are cakes as one recipe states are "best is made around Thanksgiving and kept in a tight container until Christmas"...

These are the cakes that are so cloyingly sweet and heavy that verge on being repugnant. If there is genetic memory this is the food of ancestral gorgings of frost sweetened withered grapes, browning apples fallen beneath tress and buried nuts. It was the food we ate as primitive people filling ourselves until we were stuffed for the sake of survival. It is food that we are simultaneously drawn to while being repelled.

Perhaps fruitcake is actually the apple of Eden.