Having my cake and eating it too

Every nation has its habits, preferences, tastes.

I'm pretty Catholic in my tastes having grown up in one country, Ireland, moved to another, America, and having visited a fair few others.

Over the years, and in many places, I have eaten a wide array of foods.

Some were to die for; some put one at risk of literal death.

Christmas fruit cake falls into the middle ground. I can survive without it from one end of the year to the next. But if presented with a slice of the thing I will gobble it down quickly enough, and with a degree of knowledge aforethought that is the product of three score yuletides in the old sod.

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First up, an admission. A Christmas cake, like all things, can come in a good form, or as an evil twin. Most of the time they tend to look pretty well the same, but the texture and taste can vary dramatically.

Still, this does not fully explain to me the near psychosis that is to be found in the United States when it comes to Christmas cakes in particular, and fruit cakes in general

It's right up there with President Bush's (the first one) fatwa against Broccoli, an episode that for sure cost the man the Broccoli growers vote and made life even more diffcult for countless parents trying to wean their kids off a never ending diet of carbo-stodge.

At this time of year, dissing fruit cake is a standard for American comedians and this assault resonates throughout the national psyche.

Well, all I can say is that the cake-dissers never had my mom's Christmas Cake, a creation worthy of the worldwide culinary hall of fame - that's if you could get at it.

As I recall, sometime around the middle of November my mom would go into full pre-Christmas baking mode. This involved the making of a number of Christmas Puddings (another story altogether) that would end up in porcelain bowls under the sideboard in the living room.

These puddings, with sufficient alcoholic content to facilitate several weeks of maturation, would be sealed with wax paper, aluminum foil and string. Breaking and entering, then, was a difficult mission, but not an impossible one.

Taking its place alongside the puddings, though usually a couple of weeks later, would be the Christmas Cake, a creation that would include a variety of fruit and nut ingredients that, for the most part, would not tickle the palette at any other time of year.

The cake, too, was covered, but rather more loosely.

Breaking and entering was utterly impossible though because the cake was encased in an inner seal of marzipan and an outer coating of white icing that was hard enough to take a direct hit from a thermonuclear warhead.

But there were pickings, of sorts. The top of the cake, which would be adorned with tiny Christmas scene figurines, was also dotted with small, rock-hard balls that, though made of a substance only vaguely known to physics, were indeed edible.

This little army took casualties. But missing balls could be replaced if the container was located. It was usually in the deeper recesses of a cupboard in the kitchen alongside stuff like vanilla essence and cocktail sticks.

Come Christmas and all its wonders, the cake would be presented for eating late in the day, this well after a dinner which included the pudding and usually a trifle that matched the former's whiskey or brandy content with an onslaught of sherry (have I just invented a new collective noun perhaps?).

Anyway, the cake would be a ceremony in itself. My dad would produce a knife worthy of Crocodile Dundee and attack the thing as if our very lives depended on it.

Once the outer casing was breached the inner layers gave themselves up.

Unlike the Christmas puddings, which could be easily sampled for that most precious of qualities, moistness, there was no telling what the cake would be like until the white icing had been breached.

Various aunts and uncles would usually be on hand for this Irish version of the Japanese Tea Ceremony and there would indeed be a pot of tea on hand, both to help the cake go down and/or compensate if the cake, God forbid, turned out to be dry.

This never happened as I recall. My mother was an alchemist when it came to the moisture content of puddings and cakes.

Indeed, had she been a pilgrim, American history would have taken a dramatically different turn and comedians would have been left floundering at this time of year, bereft of their fruit cake jokes.

Which would have been bad news for, well, take your pick.

 

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