One of the reasons Christmas cooking takes so much of my time is that I find myself making some things that are traditional for Mrs Walles and some that are traditional for me. I grew up eating fairly conventional New Zealand Christmas fare: ham, new potatoes, peas and carrots along with a roast, usually pork in our case but occasionally lamb. So my first American Christmas (I've had three here now, but this last one was the first in my own home) was quite a culture shock with only one point of similarity (the ham). Mrs Walles comes from Italian-American stock and so pasta figured heavily in that first Christmas dinner - not that I was complaining, mind you, as it was all excellent, but it was certainly different from what I was used to.
One of the most remarkable of all the American festive food quirks, I find, is the widespread distaste for Christmas cake, or indeed fruit cake of any kind. There is an annual competition, in Texas I believe, where fruit cakes of all shapes and sizes are lobbed by catapults to see who can hurl theirs the furthest, and my own polling indicates that many if not most Americans agree that's the only thing they are good for.
For two Christmases I was baffled. I was used to seeing Americans turning up their noses at foods they were unfamiliar with, but I couldn't understand this wholesale revulsion to such an inoffensive food. I'm well aware that not everyone in the fruitcake-eating regions of the world likes the stuff, but in America fruitcake is a kind of joke. But what really got me was that when I made my own Christmas cake, using the hallowed family recipe that never fails, the result just didn't appeal like it usually did. So unappealing was it that, even coated in a thick layer of brandy icing, most of the cake would end up in the bin shortly after New Year's Day. Was there something in the air?
But now I understand. Clearly lingering jet lag from long pre-Yuletide flights had clouded my reason over those two Christmases past. Careful investigation this year led me to discover that what is labelled "mixed fruit" here, and which is trotted out for sale as the holidays approach, is not mixed fruit as I know it. Mixed fruit should be heavy on the sultanas and raisins, but the stuff commonly available here contains not a single dried grape. Instead it contains candied pineapple and something called citron, which is the candied peel of a green citrus fruit which must taste something like a lime in the flesh. Neither is conducive to a good fruit cake, making it overly sugary sweet and dense with an off-putting flavour.
This year I purchased my dried fruits individually and mixed them myself (not a trivial matter as it turned out - the mixed peel had to come by mail order from a British food importer).
The cake that emerged from the oven this year is just as I remember it. Even Mrs Walles, long an opponent of fruit cake, had to admit that it was palatable, especially without the citron.
And so I think I've probably solved the mystery. I reckon that American fruit cake has such a bad reputation because it is made with the wrong kind of fruit. I can't imagine how this state of affairs came about. Maybe fruit cake devotees here couldn't get the best ingredients and had to make do. Maybe revolting fruit cakes were deliberately baked during the revolution to scare the British away. I don't know, but it doesn't matter. Its enough that I know I can make good fruit cake here myself. And in the unlikely event that I'm offered a slice of the genuine American article, I should probably politely decline.
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