A Cooking Life

Restoring Fruitcake’s Good Name

How did fruitcake come to be so reviled? Mention fruitcake to five people and four of them are sure to have something unkind to say about it, usually in the form of a cliché including the word ‘doorstop’ and the certainty that there is really only one single fruitcake in the world, endlessly regifted. Hahaha.

There is some funny fruitcake hate, for sure. Like this inflatable fruitcake, or this Edward Gorey illustration, or try Googling ‘fruitcake disposal’. But still. Most people can't really tell you why they hate fruitcake (and some may even confess that they've never actually tried it). Pressed, they are likely to finger the gross candied fruit and the hard, stale cake. I guess if that had been my experience of fruitcake, I'd probably hate it, too.

Fruitcake Weather

We finally got a goodly dumping of snow this week, over a foot all told. Winter at last. My stepdaughter Annie and I spent Thursday evening chopping some 16 pounds of dried fruit and candied citrus peel, all of which has been soaking in a bath of cognac and orange liqueur ever since. Tomorrow, I'll bake 2 dozen fruitcakes and slather them with bourbon for ripening.

I'll post some pictures, along with my recipe in case anyone out there wants to play along. The recipe is adapted from this Classic Fruitcake that appeared several years ago in Saveur magazine. It's originally from Maida Heatter, but I've (of course) fiddled with it.

Notes on Thanksgiving

I cooked Thanksgiving here again this year, and had some great successes by doing a few things a little differently: I mostly boned the turkey and roasted it flat, fiddled with the creamed onions, and figured out how to bake a custard pie without a soggy bottom crust (and perfected a buttermilk pie while I was at it). I just wanted to write up some notes for posterity.

Chestnut Rum Jam

‘Jam’ is really something of a misnomer for this seductive purée. It may be perfectly delicious on toast – I wouldn't know. I prefer to treat it as a sort of luxe dessert ingredient (when I'm not eating it straight from the jar). Plainly spooned over best vanilla ice cream, it shows just how exotic ‘simple’ can be. Blended into whipped cream, buttercream, or dense chocolate ganache, it becomes a decadent filling or frosting for crepes, tortes, and roulades. Hilaire Walden (my recipe is adapted from hers in Sensational Preserves) suggests layering it with whipped cream in parfait glasses. I'm of a mind to work it into a bavarian cream for a Christmas charlotte.

’Tis the season, of course, and chestnuts are in markets everywhere. Perfect timing, as this jam is a fine thing to have around for the holidays. It even cans well, and put up in fancy jars makes a lovely gift. The recipe follows, along with some useful tips for buying and peeling chestnuts.

Garden’s End

It's a melancholy thing, putting the garden to bed. Never mind the heartbreak of hacking back, uprooting, burning, and composting plants that were so lovingly nurtured. I can think of no more poignant herald of the long, cold months to come.

But gardeners are optimists by nature, and no sooner have I finished tearing down a season's effort than I've begun preparing and planning for another round. Maybe it's just a sophisticated form of denial.

Double Gingersnaps

When I was a kid, my favorite cookies were my Mother's gingersnaps – mahogany-colored with a good spanking of spice, they took some effort to bite into, they were so crisp. Her recipe came from a woman named Phyllis Dawes, the mother of a friend who was a good half-generation older than she. That would date the recipe to somewhere before the turn of the last century. Googling around, though, I find that the recipe is nearly identical to almost every gingersnap recipe out there, except for one critical difference: the quantity of flour. While the other ingredients are exactly the same, Phyllis's recipe calls for 3 cups of flour compared to only 2 cups in the other recipes. This, I believe, accounts for the dense crunch I so love. That, and giving them a proper baking.

Dish of My Dreams

Eight years ago on Labor Day I threw what was probably the most significant dinner party of my life. The universe had pointed out the guy I would spend the rest of my life with, but I was at a loss as to how to secure his attention. That night, I hosted a Mexican feast and invited the fellow in question along with a number of friends we happened to have in common. He was about to move into a house a mile up the road from me, and inviting him to dinner seemed like the neighborly thing to do. He stayed after everyone else had left, and we sat and talked long into the night. We've hardly been apart since – we were married 5 months later and live happily in the house a mile up the road.

When I mentioned last week that I'd invited guests for dinner over the weekend, my wise husband suggested that I cook Mexican.

Yes Sir, Yes Sir – Three Beds Full

There can't be an easier crop to grow than garlic, nor one that brings as much satisfaction at harvest time. Stick some cloves into the ground in November, feed it a few times in June, and come July the dirt rewards you with fat glorious heads of Vitamin G. You just can't buy garlic like this. Well, not unless you know a garlic farmer.

Garden Report: June 16

I finished planting over the weekend, even though the weather doesn't quite warrant it (overcast and 53° at 10AM this morning). The salad greens, peas, and garlic all look happy, but I'm pretty sure I caught the tomatoes scowling at me earlier, and the eggplant look like they could use a sweater. But everything was getting potbound, and I was afraid roots would start rotting from the damp. Some of the seedlings had a fine film of white mold starting on their soil surface. So into the dirt with them all! Still no beans planted, though – they'll just rot unless the soil dries out.

Soup Weather

Our early spring seems reluctant to let go. I know summer doesn't officially start until the 21st of June, but it's not unreasonable to expect some hot sunny weather from the end of May forward. It's been mostly in the 60s, even on sunny days, with temps in the low 40s or even 30s overnight – not even warm enough to sleep with the windows open (to my mind, one of the great joys of spring). And then we keep getting days like today: grey, dark, rainy, blustery, and COLD, hovering somewhere in the low 50s. It's the kind of day that forces you into a sweater and wool socks, demands a fire in the woodstove, and marches you into the kitchen to make a pot of soup.