Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Pique n' Your Interest

What's the deal with fruitcake?

I’d like to think that I'm the type of person who is open to rare and odd delicacies, particularly around the holiday season, and I would also like to add that when it comes to my daily discourse, I rarely use the word "hate".

However, every year when Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer and glow worm snowmen arrive, so too arrives a Christmas anomaly that I will quite freely declare – over a bullhorn if I have to – that I hate: fruitcake. I hate fruitcake! And I think that fruitcake may even hate me. My counsellor says that our relationship needs work.

First of all, other than random British relatives, who else eats it? Okay, perhaps a small percentage of you may – but you are probably also the type to enjoy a ripe pickled egg first thing in the morning.

The majority of us have blanked out our first (and last) fruitcake eating experience from our memory base due to olfactory damage and taste bud trauma.

When I was a wee lass staring up at my mom under the fringe of my bowl cut and the blinding glitter of tinsel, I too thought that FC would be at the top of my list, alongside ice cream cake and an array of after school concoctions.

Logistically it made perfect sense: I loved fruit, I loved cake – why not?

Yet somehow a miscalculation between the two seemed to have occurred, probably around the 1800s, in a back alleyway in the East End of London, the same time Eliza Doolittle was learning how to enunciate and the anticipation of Father Christmas was just a twinkle in Father Capitalism’s eye.

It was one of our drunken forefathers that created the first cake ’o fruit – Angus the Baker – the uncle with really long side burns and wiry eyebrows who was chronically bitter because he wanted to be the town butcher instead of the town baker and decided to channel his frustration into baked goods while drinking malt liquor.

After researching this matter a little further, I believe that the invention of fruitcake (a.k.a. piggy pudding) was a product of his misadventures: a little too much baking soda and beard sweat and a tad too many shrivelled up maraschino cherries.

So there he was, Uncle Angus, with his black apron on one cold morning, thinking to himself (insert thick British accent), "Angus, ye can't beke no more of these wee fluffy thengs. Beke yer family a rrreal cake! A hearty one that'll put hair on the chests of yer grrowin beoys."

And so the tradition was borne. Fast forward to 2004 and here we are, Santa-tastic, uber-efficient HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL, and the most macked-out cake factories like Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker are still churning out a pre-packaged version of Uncle Angus’s nasty brown loaf-cake with itsy bits of foul fruit.

What could be worse? Well, how about homemade fruitcake like my Uncle Dave’s? He lets it sit in his freezer for a year on the premise that fruitcake is like a good wine; you have to let it age its way towards perfection.

So post-baking, he throws a little Saran Wrap on all 25 loaves, stacks them in his deep freeze and then come Christmas Eve 365 days later, he pulls out one of the 25 for consumption – the other 24 go to the neighbours and the local priest.

And every year he stands at the head of the table with a Christmas cracker hat on sideways (that is usually held up by a suspect grin reaching from ear to ear) douses the sucker with a little Captain Morgan and throws a match to it.

It's quite a spectacle, like a large brown flaming sambucha shot but far more exciting. I figure this whole burning process helps kill the residual freezer burn off of the year old cake. Besides, why not saturate carcinogens with rum? Yummy! The very thought of the whole event makes me feel fuzzy and festive all over.

Of course, every year my mom takes a photo of the whole flaming fruitcake sideshow, despite our annual reminder to her that the flame never shows up in her photos. And even though she hears us, I'm quite sure that every year she secretly gets worked up just to prove all of us wrong and is later disappointed (around mid-January) over the Kodak counter while flipping through her holiday developments.

Insert mom’s internal dialogue: "Oh my lamb, and there he is, Uncle Dave, yellow hat, goofy grin, (eyes trail down) over his brown loaf of… no flame." A sigh of resignation most likely follows.

And why is it that our parents like fruitcake? Is it something that comes with retirement? Are you naturally drawn to potentially flammable goods after turning 60? Even the name "fruitcake" has a negative connotation. What's the first thing that comes to your head when someone cuts you off on the highway or pushes in front of you at IGA? "What a fruitcake." I mumble it under my breath all the time.

I hate to break it to all of you fruitcake-eating sheep, but fruitcake is not your friend. Stick with predictable desserts: apple pie, trifle, o.d. on Turtles if you must. Just remember the next time you’re offered a slice of it, that it is an evolutionary mistake that happened somewhere between tortiares and friendship muffins. (Don't get me started on friendship muffins.) Fruitcake is the weakest link. It was never meant to be!