Fruitcake vital part of holiday family tradition

How dare the family suggest I not make fruitcake this year.

That would be tossing out tradition in some cavalier flick and wave of the hand: thank you, but no.

Hmph! So no one in the family really enjoys my fruitcake; ergo, I’m not supposed to make it anyway?

That’s not what the holidays are about. Julie Andrews told me years ago that I could have a “few of my favorite things.” It didn’t have to be raindrops on roses or snowflakes that fall on lashes. No siree. It could be that my very favorite thing at this time of year is making fruitcake from my mother’s recipe. And I didn’t hear anything in sweet, dear Julie’s song that said I had to ask my family’s permission.

Voila – perfection. For four hours Saturday, I sat at the old oak table where my Mama picked many a nut, grated her annual coconut and chopped candied fruit for her Christmas fruitcakes.

On that foggy, misty morning, I did the same thing, loving every minute of it, creaming one pound of butter and a pound of sugar. Adding baking powder to a pound of flour. Then cutting up and dredging with some of the flour -you won’t believe this – one pound of candied pineapple, one pound candied cherries, one pound pecans, one pound mixed nuts, one pound light (golden) raisins. Cutting up, mind you, with the speed of Leontyne Price on the stereo. When she sang Verdi, I slowly chopped the sticky red and green cherries; when she bellowed out Bizet’s Carmen, I sliced those candied pineapple as quickly as playing piano keys. By the time she sang “Ride On, King Jesus,” I was immersed in separating 10 eggs, whisking yolks in one bowl, beating stiff the egg whites in another.

As Leontyne sang Malotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer,” I dropped tears into the batter along with lemon, almond and vanilla flavorings. Emulating my mother, who never heard that prayer sung by some soprano in the church choir without crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief until she closed them altogether.

“Add two jiggers of whiskey, but work in so as not to curdle,” Mama’s fruitcake recipe continues. Add to the batter the bowl of candied fruit, nuts and raisins a little at a time, ever so slowly (while Leontyne is singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”) and then add flaked coconut and beaten egg whites, my hands scooping and skimming, shaping and folding, mixing and blending.

The trick is to have the loaf pans double lined with brown paper-as in olden days when grocery stores didn’t use plastic bags – and fill by handfuls the fruitcake into the pans, “jiggling,” Mama said, “to completely spread out.”

After baking the cakes for almost two hours and smelling those familiar aromas that took me back to my mother’s kitchen 40 years ago, I remembered my own family’s advice to forget the fruitcake this year.

You’ve got to be kidding. Just remember Mama, me and Nietzsche:

“Every tradition grows ever more venerable – the more remote is its origin, the more confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe.”