so, in a fit to clean out my fridge to start laying in supplies for the holiday baking season, i came across a small glass bowl filled with macerated dried fruit left over from my (failed) experiment in making black cake. still good, of course, because it was macerated in port and rum. i found a recipe for a quick dried fruit bread and plunked that stuff in.
the smell of all the liquor-soaked fruit reminded me so much of my dad, i sat on the couch and had a good cry. my dad loved fruit cake, loved it with this kind of twisted glee born of loving something most people would just as soon use as a door stop.
when i was growing up we were dirt poor. i have eight brothers and sisters from a his-hers-ours array of steps and halfs (everybody else except my baby brother are halfs because we are the ours). anyway, we were really poor, but my dad decided he was going to make a fruit cake for christmas, the kind you make and repeatedly soak with liquor while it ages for a couple months before the feasting.
i don’t know if you’ve ever made fruit cake, but the ingredients are expensive. this one was apparently very expensive, especially given we were practically church mice. it had all kinds of dried and candied fruits including angelica (which is crazy expensive) and whole brazil nuts and was supposed to be soaked in some expensive fortified wine which dad had to drive to another county to buy (the county i grew up in was at one time the headquarters of a national temperence movement). he baked it up, wrapped it tightly, dousing it good beforehand with part of the bottle of brandy or sherry or whatever and put it on top of the fridge.
about a month later my mom came home from work and this line of ants was travelling from the front door up the side of the kitchen wall to the top of the fridge. she pulled down the ant encrusted fruitcake to find they had eaten fully half of it and were having a big ol’ drunken ant party. looking back on it, it’s kind of funny. but, at the time, my dad was just devastated. all that effort, all that money. he never made another fruit cake that i can remember.
i cut a still warm heel off the loaf i made last night and cried my eyes out eating it. i hope they serve 20 kinds of fruit cake every morning where ever he is now.
