The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [176]
Many Christmas customs still puzzle me. Why, for example, would you want to celebrate a joyous event by going out and killing an innocent pine tree, draping it with shredded aluminum foil and dyed popcorn, and throwing it in the garbage a week later? But fruitcake is another thing entirely. By now I have eaten as many fruitcakes as any God-fearing Christian, and I can’t imagine what everybody is complaining about.
Fruitcake entered my life on a permanent basis twenty years ago, when the woman who was to become my wife moved in, bringing with her all the edible mores of a Mormon upbringing. (Her family abounds with members of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, though an errant granduncle once joined the Butch Cassidy gang in Baggs, Wyoming.) Every year, right after Thanksgiving, her mother, Marjorie Smith, mailed us several small white fruitcakes neatly wrapped in waxed paper and meant to be aged and ripened in the refrigerator until Christmas. We would observe this rule with only one of them and polish off the others, paper-thin slice by paper-thin slice, long before December arrived. Two weeks later Aunt Vivian from Salt Lake City would send a large, dark, spicy fruitcake suspended in a shoebox with her patented protective caramel-popcorn insulation. Sometimes the shoebox was large enough to hold another little package containing delicate sugar cookies decorated with red and green sprinkles. In keeping with Mormon religious rules, none of the family’s fruitcakes included any alcohol.
Marjorie’s white fruitcake quickly became my favorite. The recipe was created by Aunt Esther in Twin Falls, but Esther never sent us fruitcake and Marjorie never failed to, which is why I always think of it as Marjorie’s. It is, at bottom, a rich yellow lemon pound cake, unleavened, slightly underbaked, and filled with a volume of fruit and nuts equal to that of the cake batter—green and red candied cherries and pineapple, walnuts, and yellow raisins. When you have kept it in the refrigerator for a week or two, it becomes dense and less cakelike, and when you slice it thin, the result is a translucent, frolicsome mosaic of yellows, reds, and greens, two of which, I believe, are the official colors of Christmas. Marjorie collected her candied fruit and her packing boxes by Labor Day to avoid the year-end rush.
The other day, as I was thumbing through women’s magazines from Christmases past—searching for good advice on making and mailing edible gifts and finding nothing better than a recipe for chocolate-chip pretzel bread—I came across several warnings not to use popcorn or breakfast cereals as the filler in your Christmas packages. They are thought to entice insects and absorb noxious fumes. But let me assure you that the candied popcorn protecting Aunt Vivian’s fruitcake never attracted the tiniest insect or the merest wisp of a noxious fume. The magazines suggest using crumpled newspaper instead. That works fine if you mail your gift from Salt Lake City and crumple up a copy of the Deseret News, but if you live in New York or Los Angeles, your hapless recipient is likely to read “Store Santa Slashes Tots, Self, on Sleigh” before he or she reaches the delicacies within.
When my wife moved in, she had twenty-two living aunts and uncles, and you never knew whether Aunt Melva would send a box of her taffy or Aunt Frances a jar of her jam cooked from berries she had picked the summer before near her house in Olympic National Forest. Some years Aunt Evelyn in Salt Lake City would send us a tin of her famous butter mints, a delicate, creamy candy arduously made from hand-pulled sugar. At the age of eighty, Evelyn recently supplied butter mints to the four hundred guests at her granddaughter’s wedding (two per customer), and once a year she makes them for the twenty-eight widows living in her ward and put under her charge, but she never sends enough