I refuse to believe such an abomination exists.

That's why I was traumatized earlier in life. That and there being no soaking-in-booze involved.

Gum drops?
Gum drops?

**shudders.**

Woah! Really? I think I see the problem....

Greg "never met a fruitcake that couldn't double as a manhole cover" London

Somewhere in one of the boxes I have a recipe for fruitcake cookies that's an excuse for pecans.

Another hazard of fruitcakes is failure to chop the fruits finely enough. You get that wodge of cherry because an uncautious baker tossed the container of candied cherry halves straight into the mix. Too lazy to dice the bloody things, I suspect.

Where do you get the fresh citron to candy? I'd love to do my own. The best I've ever had came from a now defunct cooking store, they imported theirs from Israel.

I agree with you on only the best ingredients -- I probably drop $50 to $100 per batch on mine. Fruitcake baking is a weekend project for me, one day spent chopping various ingredients, the next making the batter (standard pound cake really), adding the goodies, and baking the result.

This year I didn't get around to baking mine until November. I usually try to do them Columbus Day weekend, to give the fruitcake a couple of months to mellow. If the scent coming from the tins is any indication, this year's cake should be just right in a couple of weeks.

You say that as though it were a bad thing.

Warning this is a DARK fruitcake and an addictive one.

I think fruitcake has become one of the food items that are worth eating only if homemade.

That, P J, sounds like a scene from a Tim Burton movie.

"Do you like fruitcake?"
"Ugh! No, I can't stand fruitcake! Why?"
"Ok, I didn't want to give you a fruitcake if you didn't like them. Here's a cherry-cranberry-blueberry cake instead. It doesn't keep as long as a fruitcake, only about a week. Eat it in good health."

(Across office) "Do you like fruitcake?"
"Ooo! I love fruitcake! I'll take Billy's fruitcake, if he doesn't want it."
"All right. Let me get a fruitcake for you. This is a different kind of fruitcake..."
"That's ok, I like all kinds of fruitcake!"
"It doesn't have rum in it, so you need to eat it in less than a week."
"I can do that!"
"OK, enjoy!"
"Hey! This isn't fruitcake! This is the cherry-cranberry stuff you gave Billy!"

My mother made wonderful fruitcake, although it was so alcoholic that we children were never allowed to eat very much of it.

In a world of spam sushi, deep-fried anything, and energy beer, you have trouble with cheap candy in fruitcake?

All of your suggestions sound like a good way of making a slighlty less awful fruitcake, but nevertheless something I'd probably still avoid at the holiday dessert table.

Reading Jo's cousin's fruitcake recipe caused me to look up Farenheit in Wikipedia (to find out just why Farenheit degrees are the size they are), and it turns out there are a bunch of competing theories, so naturally some people blame it on Freemasonry.

Another genuinely good mail-order fruitcake is the Deluxe Fruitcake from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas. High-grade pecans, high-quality candied fruits . . . no hooch, but they supply instructions on their web page for doctoring it. This one has been my family's Definitive Fruitcake for as long as I can remember.

I am not certain that Teresa's recipes properly address this issue.

Here's what I believe to be the best of the Fahrenheit degree explanations.

0 is the coldest temperature that can be achieved using ice/water/salt mixture.

100 is body temperature.

Everything else follows.

You find citrons by keeping a sharp eye out for them at the right time of year (now-ish). Anyone who spots citrons, Buddha's Hand citrons, or other strange citrus fruit in NYC will PLEASE LET ME KNOW at their earliest convenience.

I usually use dried fruit and home-candied orange peel (the stuff you can buy disturbs me). Dried papaya chunks are great in fruitcake--pretty, tasty, and hold their shape well.

This year I'm going to try a variant of Trinidad Black Cake, sans maraschino cherries and with different dried fruit.

This recipe is pretty close to what I've had.

But the one fruitcake which I long for, and could not eat even if I had the recipe for reasons of diabetes and walnut allergy, was basically dates and walnuts layered in a loaf pan and covered with a batter made of eggs, butter, very little flour,and orange zest.

Really good fruit cake is ambrosial; really bad fruitcake is, unfortunatly pervasive.

And in other "spice" things where (spice != chili)

* * *

One (new) year I bought, from a drug store sale table, maybe four of those really shabby Hostess (?) fruitcakes for perhaps $.50 each.

I used them as breakfast food, toasting a very thin slice to eat along with cereal and coffee.

Or maybe in the real version of Parade magazine, between an article on how celebrities decorate for the holidays and a column by a doctor on telling if your teen is in danger of becoming a goth.

The most common assortment I've seen is:

White = peppermint
Green = spearmint
Yellow = Clove
Pink = wintergreen
Red = cinnamon

The same kind of things you get in a "spice cake"--cloves, cinammon, nutmeg, that kind of thing. I have no idea which, or in what combination, though.

There's wintergreen growing around my grandparents' house, but I hardly go up there anymore. Fresh wintergreen tea is like nothing on earth. Fabulously good.

This also turns out to be a mighty good method for producing edible sculpture (though it helps to use less fruits and nuts). My first was a dragon tail (having read Farmer Giles of Ham and being warned that real dragon tail was much to dangerous) with marzipan vertebrae, upper scales of green glazed cherries and lower of glazed pineapple and spines of candied orange slices fixed in place with festive frilled toothpicks. The most complicated was a 2 ft tall subtlety of St. Cecilia for the Southern California Early Music Society, with marzipan clothing and organ, and a halo of edible stained glass. It was a little weird having her for dessert, but we did.

My mother, bless her heart, revealed to me at Thanksgiving that she secretly likes those long fruitcake doorstops. She's 91, but not demented, so I guess this is just one of her peculiarities. My father just rolled his eyes, but I promised to bring her one of the locally-baked ones.

Can we add the horror of modern mincemeat to this, as it suffers the same fate, starting with the whole "Where's the meat?" issue.

I also have, somewhere, my godmother's recipe for a chocolate-cherry-pecan fruitcake (it, too, is not a traditional fruitcake)--you can too make them with chocolate.

I read Jo Walton's Cousin Beryl's recipe last year, and mean to try it, but if anyone has a really and truly traditional fruitcake (dense and spicy with only enough cake to hold the fruit together, please age for a month or two sort of thing) recipe that they like, I'd love to have one.

As the penultimate step of the recipe, after all of the lovely boozy cake mix and the lovely fruity goodness have been mixed together in the giant stew pot, and our hands are thoroughly coated in candied fruit, we are required to "fold in eggwhites." This is the point where everyone in the kitchen indulges in a communal giggle and several sips of leftover brandy.

Hokay, now where's my fifteen cents?!

On advantage to using drier candied fruit, as well as simple dried fruit: This is another chance to add booze, because all that dry fruit needs to be moistened up a bit. Besides sherry, other wines good for this included Madeira and Malaga. Also malmsey, if you can get it. Mead works well, too. There's port, if you prefer.

On Christmas puddings: our family recipe contains carrot. For many years I and my Mum had assumed that this was introduced to the recipe during rationing when sugar was difficult to get hold of. But when I spoke to my Grandmother, it turns out that it was in the recipe when she learnt it in the 20s. I also learnt many of the strange things that went on during rationing, especially if you kept chickens, two of your brothers were farmers, and it turned out that they were building an airbase filled with Americans just down the road.

I've got a recipe I begged off my English teacher in high school, as it was the first edible fruitcake I'd ever had. I'd made it once myself then, but at the time my father had (thankfully, but recently) gone dry and there was no brandy in the house with which to dose it. So I rummaged in the back of the cabinets until I turned up the only spirits left: whiskey and vermouth.

The cake was...good, but strange. And I never tasted that same flavor combination again until twenty odd years later when a friend bought me a Manhattan. As I remarked, memories washing back, "I haven't tasted this in years. But last time it was crunchy."

I'll try to find the recipe, but I'd recommend dosing it with something other than the ingredients for a Manhattan.

It, too, makes a very dark rich fruitcake.

On the inside was a perfect image of one of those fruitcakes that arrives at your door in a red-and-green tin covered with Victorian Santas and similar kitsch.

My mother and I stood in the grocery store aisle where we found the card, and howled with laughter.

(My beloved grandmother used to have one of those fruitcakes shipped to us every year. Some brave soul would try a piece or two when it first arrived. And then it would sit untouched on our counter until July or August, when my mother would finally throw it away.)

But you're right, fruitcake can be good. My college roommate once made me a very light, lemony one.

There's an Italian version, panforte, which seems to be a specialty of the area surrounding Siena. It's a medieval recipe, flat (about 5/8 in [1cm] thick), and comes in several styles: with chocolate dusted on, with figs, and "bianca". Get an artisanal version; stuff from Italian imitators of General Foods (Bellino comes to mind) are quite horrible. The bottoms of all of them are what the ingredient lists insist on calling "wafer", presumably because it's a thin dried sugar paste stamped in a diamond pattern.

I bet the bottoms were originally something like almond paste (making them even more medieval).

Scary, but maybe not too scary to try:

Dollar Store Penatone

Lori,

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cosentino's groceries carry the fresh goods, one bin of sheer baking yumminess after another. They've had stuff available since mid-september, and since there's still Pannetone making (and a Portguese version of such I won't attempt to spell the name of), it will continue through the holidays.

And we have fresh citron as well. There are local growers who sell locally.

Tis the season for citrusy things--about a dozen of my Meyer lemons all decided to ripen en masse over the last week.

I worked in a Kosher kitchen in college, and that was the only time I've ever seen a citron. I was told by the guys I worked with that there was an older woman who lived nearby that collected them from whoever remembered she liked them. She was probably candying them, though I can no longer recall.

However, even though I have to avoid fruitcake these days, I still reserve some space for one that can proudly compete with Collin Street. The Camaldolese Benedictine hermits in Big Sur make a brandy soaked and aged fruitcake that has been gaining adherents out here on the West coast. So moist that I suggest leaving it overnight in the refrigerator before cutting it -- that way you actually get slices. And the monks will take regular orders for Christmas delivery through the 19th (the 20th in the West). The Hermitage is literally the farthest into Big Sur that UPS is willing to drive, and they make extra runs this time of year to keep up with the orders.

Truth in advertising notice: It is true that I am an oblate of that community, and this is one of the main forms of income for the Hermitage. But the fruitcakes are that good. Trust me -- they have been causing massive sugar highs for tourists on Highway 1 for decades.

(However, the candying process appears to require hours and a hot stove. I think I shall first visit all the local Asian food markets first, to see what they have in the candied fruits section.)

(I also like store-bought eggnog. And wine with a screw-off cap. And the Star Wars prequels. Pardon me, I'ma go reread "Qualities of Experience" now.)

Small world. My mother is (or has been - don't know if she still is) their lawyer. I've been addicted to their fruitcake for decades.

And like the Italian nougat, too. Same stuff. I'd forgotten that. (Now why did I need a new filling because of a too-hard pizza crust and not because of the Torrone hard divinity>)

Needless to say, I love fruitcake.

The mincemeat issue IS related. She also made awesome mincemeat, starting from a recipe that says "Take twenty pounds of moose meat..." Nor did she stint of the brandy during the preparation thereof. I found an heirloom stash of quart Mason jars of the stuff (she pressure canned it) some while after her death, which I ate a bite at a time with a spoon, storing the jar in my fridge and keeping the top surface of the mincemeat in the jar under a half inch of brandy to prevent mold.

Needless to say, I don't recognize most of what's sold as mincemeat (it's what, oxidized applesauce and guar gum?) these days.

If someone wants to go on an adventure and play with these recipes by all means, go have fun.
http://sucrelefey.livejournal.com/99677.html
http://sucrelefey.livejournal.com/82353.html

I mildly object to your Hawaiian Shirt Tourist claim.

do you also object to people characterising spam sushi/musubi as everything that is wrong with the world, as erik olson did in post 17?

i was all set to be indignant about said delicacy (indignant on snob principle, since i eat neither sushi nor pork of any kind), until it was pointed out to me that it's a hawaiian thing. & that it's actually a fascinating cultural phenomenon, melding the cuisine of two of hawai'i's longstanding ethnic groups: japanese & us army.

Haven't made it since - we found that good quality fruits and nuts makes fruitcake an expensive experiment that we can't guarantee will get eaten (considering many people's fear of the stuff).

(I used to like fruitcake when I was little and my mother made it every year, but then one day I realized I didn't like it anymore, so she stopped making it.)

We're using a recipe from Naparima Girls High School Cookbook. The fruit is soaking in rum and cherry brandy as we speak.

I've increased the quantity of alcohol as per advice from my aunt, who calls it "drunken fruitcake." I've got a chunk of one of her masterpieces that she gave me when I visited, and will go nibble on it once I post.

Neither of those seem to quite fit with both moose meat and brandy.

Mincemeat, as sold commercially in the US, is generally the second product you described, dried fruit, with sugar and spices, generally sold in cans or jars, to put in pies.

This product is derived from an older product, which was mince in the first sense (chopped up meat) combined with dried fruit, sugar, and brandy, also to put in pies.

At some point, the meat, and sometimes the alcohol, was dropped from the concept of "mincemeat" in the US, at least for what is sold in stores. So older, homemade recipes are treasured for the original concept of meat, fruit, spice and alcohol. Which, when you think of it, is what a lot of medieval cooking was about.

UK English retains "mince" for both of the modern forms, while US English uses "mincemeat" for the spiced fruit and "ground meat" for the chopped up flesh.

Moose meat would suggest an old recipe from a rural area, where folks still hunt, and moose may be hunted and used for meat. A poor farmer's substitute for ground beef, which would either have to be bought or be the result of butchering a farm animal. (Prior to licensed hunting, a moose might have been shot on principle, since it might go after a farm's crops.)

It's a lot easier to buy a box of 'Nonesuch'.

Linkmeister - Ah, yes. You're right. Chalk it up to a casualty of my lifelong battle against acute adjectivitis. (Those shirts are lovely, though. Do they come in black on black?)

Or like those Mexican sugar-candies with the thin wafer on both sides of the candy; otherwise you couldn't get it off your fingers. (I seem to recall from the last time I met one, a couple of months ago, that it was labelled 'Oblate'. Just to add another use of the term - not unrelated, I'm sure.)

TW @ #53, could please post or link to your gingerbread recipe?

I love gingerbread. I don't like most dried fruit, but the idea of a chocolate fruit cake intrigues me. I think I will have to experiment a little. If it comes out, I will post the recipe, something along the lines of chocolate, orange-peel, and almond cake doused with Cointreau.

On mincemeat - from what I can tell, it was originally a mixture of meat scraps and dried fruit, heavily seasoned and mixed with brandy to preserve it. I remember reading about it in "Farmer Boy" by Laura Ingalls Wilder, I think. I begged my mother to make me mince pie after I read that, then hated it when actually presented with the dish.

Just sayin'.

You're not mistaken, Xopher. An "oblate" is defined as a person offered or dedicated in some way to God. The original oblati were children offered to religious houses to be raised -- the practice is mentioned in chapter 59 of the Rule. Within a century the practice became increasingly regulated (for example, requiring that oblati be able to choose at puberty whether to stay or leave) and died off. The term came to be applied to one of several types of person residing with a monastic community without vows. This evolved to the current understanding that an oblate is generally a lay person with an officially recognized relationship to a particular Benedictine community. We make promises, not vows as monks do. (What confuses this is that there are some religious orders with the word "oblate" in their title. Not the same thing.) We are obligated to follow the Rule of Benedict as appropriate for someone living in the secular world. Worldwide there are currently about 25,000 Benedictine oblates.

Oblates are different from the associates or tertiaries of other orders in that we are associated not to the Ordinis Sancti Benedicti as a whole but to one specific community -- in my case New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Also, oblates are not necessarily Catholics. One example is Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk who is an oblate and a Presbyterian. (For some reason or another, there are a lot of Presbyterian oblates.) Other well known modern oblates were Jacques Maritain and Dorothy Day.

St. John's Abbey, Collegeville has a good page on oblates. The Camaldolese oblate rule is online, along with the article Shared Solitude by Deborah Smith Douglas , another oblate of New Camaldoli.

I make this fruitcake recipe every winter.

Before I made it, I was 100% sure I didn't like fruitcake. Now I know, I just like this fruitcake; others still don't appeal much. People that usually claim to hate fruitcake often like it. Bonus, it is good fresh.

http://www.fruitcakesociety.org/

I've made panforte many times. Minicon attendees from the first year I helped run programming may recall the perpetual supply of panforte in the Green Room. The principle is fairly simple: take candied citron, citrus peel, and/or melon rind, and dice it finely. Toast and chop almonds and hazelnuts in measure equal to the candied peel or rind. Pinon nuts may also be added to make up the whole. When I'm feeling daring, I add some pistachios.

Take a scant one-sixth as much flour as fruit and nut mixture, and to it add cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, and white pepper, or whatever spice mixture you prefer, plus a dab of salt. Sift the flour mixture over the fruit and nuts, and mix them together well. Boil sugar and honey together to make a syrup, then pour it over the fruit, nut, and flour mixture. Mix all together well.

Meanwhile, either line a pan with wafer(s), or grease it, then line it with parchment, then grease the parchment. Press the panforte mixture into the pan. Bake at 300 F. for about half an hour. Turn it out on a cooling rack. If you used parchment, peel it off when the panforte's cool. Dust the whole with confectioner's sugar and seal it in a tightly lidded tin until you can't stand to wait any longer.

Some people put unsweetened chocolate into their panforte nero. It's a subordinate part of the flavoring, not the reason for the thing to exist in the first place.

Some decent-looking recipes for panforte:

Panforte Margherita from the middle of the bell curve.
The same, only better described.
Another unexceptionable Panforte Margherita.
Panforte nero.

T.W (53), please feel encouraged to post your maritimer dark fruit cake recipe here, ditto your white fruitcake recipe and your not really fruitcake recipes. Alternately, a link would be fine.

Stefan Jones (64): "Scary, but maybe not too scary to try: Dollar Store Penatone."

Panettone sometimes gets described as "Italian brioche". The dollar-store kind can be a little dry, but it's generally quite good. Buy it a few days in advance of use. Inside the colorful paper carton, the cake should be sealed inside a plastic bag. Open the bag and splash the cake liberally with a half-cup or more of sherry. Reseal the bag and put the whole thing away for a few days.

Panettone slices, toasted and buttered, are great. It also makes nifty French toast and bread pudding.

TChem (68): "One way to find citron is to make friends with Orthodox Jews around Sukkot, when it's used cermonially and whole, and say 'Hey, that lumpy citrus fruit you usually throw away? Can I get that when you're done with it?'"

Go ahead. Ask my Jewish friends in NYC how often I've offered to take unwanted citrons off their hands after Sukkot. So far I'm batting a big fat zero.

Paula Helm Murray (71): "Granted I've only had citron in traditional commercial fruitcakes, and never fresh/sugared, but I think the taste of the form I'm familiar with is abhorrent. I'd like to be proven wrong, because I like most citrus flavors more than I like vanilla or chocolate."

I've got some hard-candied citron left over from previous years. I'll try it on you and see if you like it.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale (72): "What would you do with Buddha's Hand citrons? Make candied peels? The fresh form has started showing up at the local farmers market ($6/lb)."

(Whimpering sounds.) The cheapest I've ever seen it out here has been $10-$15 per pound (more usually $15), and that's for BHCs in not terribly good condition.

You make candied peels. Wash them well and slice them thinly at right angles to the fingers, starting at the stem end. Follow a standard recipe for candied citrus peel, only leave out the part where you boil it in several changes of water to strip out that nasty citrus peel flavor. Stop at the syrup stage if you want candied peel in syrup, and put it up in bottles while it's still boiling. Otherwise let the syrup concentrate more. Stop before it starts browning. Fish the candied peel out of the syrup, and as soon as it's cool enough to handle, separate the slices and lay them out on boards or jelly roll pans covered with aluminum foil or plastic wrap. Turn the slices a few times while they're drying. If you have a gas range that has a pilot light burning all the time, dry them in there.

If you like such things, you can dredge them in decorative colorless large-crystal sugar before they stop being sticky. I don't do it.

Chris Quinones (78): "I've seen Buddha's hands in NYC recently somewhere; Garden of Eden?"

Which one?

My mother was a traditionalist who lovingly candied various things, liberally added dates and dried fruits and various nuts, then wrapped the cakes in cheesecloth and soaked em in whatever strong spirits she had in the pantry.

I, alas, am never that organized far enough ahead of time. I definitely miss good fruitcake, though.

Actually, we're kinda used to getting ridiculed for our Hormel spam habits, so maybe it just went right past me.

Dan @#93, Black on black, probably not. Green on black, quite possibly.

I also have to admit to not caring for the traditional Christmas pudding either (brought in flaming, no less). My goal was usually to see how much hard sauce (homemade, which I liked) I could get away with putting on only a very little pudding.

As someone noted above this involved shredded carrots and a lot of suet and raisin-y things. I have the recipe somewhere; my mom got it from my great aunt, I believe. My mother doesn't know where my great aunt got it from, but if she got it from her mother, it came from around Cambridge or the potteries in England, I think.

What we settled on for Christmas desert is trifle. We do not necessarily agree on the recipe; one of my brothers puts bananas in it, which is an abomination. Mine is the result of some years of poking at the recipe and consists of pound cake, creme anglaise, mixed berries (mostly blackberries and raspberries), slivered almonds, and a berry liquer (I used to use Whidbey's, but it's not made any more.)

If you like plants, you can grow your own Buddha's Hand Lemon tree. The site says to leave them outdoors in the summer, and bring them indoors during the winter. A friend of mine whose a gardner says these people have good stuff.

Address: 105 W. 3rd St., Palisade, CO, USA
Phone: 970/464-0577

Of course, we didn't do this every year. Those three puddings were for the following three years. Indeed, the three-year cycle was usually overlapped -- that is, the pudding served that year (half at Christmas and half at New Year's dinner) would be the last of the three puddings made in the previous batch. Our Christmas pudding would have aged, wrapped in the fridge, for all that time -- always at least a year, sometimes more than three years -- its flavour getting ever richer with time, deeper, more mysteriously complex.

It would be served, re-steamed, with a simple almond-flavored pour-on white sauce.

I have the recipe here somewhere, but I don't have the equipment to make it, or the persistence to age it properly.

I've been thinking of caking some fruit for Christmas, and the guidelines in my head for the fruitcake I'd like to make are: 1) NO CITRON!, 2) a light, scant batter, 3)pecans, 4) more pecans, 5) dried stone fruits (peaches, apricots), chopped small, and 6) use Myer's Rum as the alcohol.

(Some people sneer at Myer's Rum, saying it's too sweet and a "dessert" rum. Precisely. It's one of the very few that I can actually drink straight; most rums are far too harsh for me to enjoy. And Myer's is excellent for baking and cooking.)

Is there a difference betwen citron and lemon? After all the former is the word for the latter in French.

And TNH: I'm glad the cake was good on the train. Cousin Beryl, who is my first cousin once removed and now over seventy, would be really surprised to see how far her recipe has travelled.

Dave Luckett @ 74: Stained-glass window cake sounds like what I'm trying to find a recipe for! Do you happen to have the recipe, and would you be willing to share it?

Magenta Griffith @ 95: I will try and dig up the recipe, and post up a link to it when I do. (It will be a good excuse to get me to actually call my godmother.)

And a partridge in a peartree...

(Of course, people knew already that the French word for 'partridge' is 'perdrix', pronounced, yes, 'peardree'.)

Chocolate Fruitcake

1 1/2 cups figs (I used Black Mission figs); stemmed,-diced, dried-about 7-1/2
oz
1 c Prunes; pitted and diced
1 c Cherries, pitted and diced
1 c Dates; pitted and diced
1 c raisins, diced
1/2 c Dark rum or spiced rum
3 tb Orange peel; minced
2&1/2 c All-purpose flour; sifted
1 1/2 ts Baking powder
1 1/2 ts Baking soda
3/4 ts Ground cinnamon
3/4 ts grated nutmeg
3/4 ts Salt
2 c sugar
3 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp bland oil
2/3 cup boiling hot water
4 eggs
10 oz Bittersweet (not unsweetened OR semi-sweet chocolate, finely
chopped
1/4 cup cocoa
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3/4 c Butter; unsalted, room-temperature

Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 325 degrees.

Prepare pans.

Combine fruit and rum.. Let stand 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Sift
flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt into medium bowl.

Cream butter and sugar.

Place unsweetend chocolate,cocoa and molasses in a small bowl. Add oil and
boiling water, stir to combine.

Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Using rubber spatula,
mix in 1/3 of the dry ingredients. Add cocoa mixture and half of fruit, then
remaining dry ingredients, then remaining fruit and chocolate. Spoon batter
into prepared pan. Bake until tester inserted near ceeter of cake comes out
with just a few crumbs attached, covering cake loosely with foil if browning
too quickly, about 1 hour and 30 minutes. Let stand 20 minutes. Turn pan over
onto rack. Let stand 3 minutes; gently lift off pan. Cool completely.

Douse with rum, wrap and let age for at least a couple of weeks.

Have I mentioned recently how much I love Montreal?

The fruits listed are all dried, *not* candied. The only candied fruit I use in fruitcakes I candy myself. As Ms. Nielsen Hayden said in the original blog entry one should use the best quality ingredients possible. I use Appleton Gold rum, and I often only add part of the last 1/2 cup flour, depending on batter consistency. I usually bake these as several small cakes rather than one large one, and age them wrapped in waxed paper.

And I'll be quiet now. Sorry for the incomplete recipe.

I've made real fruitcake too, years ago. The Joy of Cooking has a pretty good recipe, including the marinating in brandy or other spirits, and we made a huge batch to give as gifts to friends and family. It was incredibly good, but turned out to be a lot of work and not at all cheap when you factored in the price of good quality ingredients and decent brandy.

Ny, most of us are in no way august and have been welcomed here nonetheless. Join the crowd!

Many of this company are august. I've occasionally managed july, myself, but frequently get no better than may. I'm probably somewhere in march at present.

TNH is very december, and the late John Ford was several invented months beyond the year end.

Based on your recipe, I'd place you at september at the worst.

ROFLMAO (from somewhere around February, I think ...)

I think that puts me at April, then? It's an advance over March, which is mere madness.

In other news, I made a molasses-based gingerbread yesterday (while I was posting about panforte, in fact). The recipe comes from the _Crabtree and Evelyn Cookbook_ and seems to be foolproof (I've used it for 10-15 years now) but may give people pause with the addition of the boiling water and baking soda mixture.

Teresa, thank you for your meditation on panforte.

Ursula @91 - When I was little, my mom made real mince pies, probably one of the last vestigies of our English heritage. I really prefer the kind with the meat - not vegetarian friendly, but still.

Ny, if this group were truly august, they wouldn't let me comment at all. Very democratic, Making Light.

When you buy packaged lebkuchen, it often comes on oblaten. I think it makes baking easier, since it prevents the baked goods from sticking to the pan.

Ah heck, I don't think I wrote it down anyway. It went something like this:

Start in October.

About two pounds of dried (not candied) fruits (dark and golden raisins, apricots, pineapple, papaya, I think I had dried cherries that year and I can't recall what else, not like it matters.)
Put in wok, pour in rum to cover it, seal with plastic.
Ignore for a couple of days.
About a pound of shelled nutmeats (almonds, filberts, pecans, whatever.)
Dump those in the fruit and rum.
Give a good stir, recover and ignore a couple more days.
Add more rum if it looks dry.
Preheat oven to 350F.
In largest bowl (bigger than wok) sift together - flour, ginger, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, soda. The ratio was about 1 cup flour per 2 lb goodies, spices widely adjustable to taste, 1/4 tsp soda to 1 cup flour so it thinks about rising, then rolls over and pulls the blanket over its head instead.

In medium small bowl, beat two eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, and some vanilla extract.

Dump wet fruit and nut mixture from wok into floury mess. Stir well until wet fruit is coated with flour. There should be some loose flour in the largest bowl but not much. Add more flour if it seems prudent, then stir the egg-sugar glop in by spoonfulls. The batter should be sticky, dense and very lumpy - chunks of fruit and nut with just enough batter to coat them.

Put into pans, bake at medium heat until toothpick comes out clean. Anywhere from half an hour to 45 minutes for mini loaves to twice that for a big pan.

Cool completely in pan, then soak in rum. I think I wrapped them in aluminum foil since I didn't have cheesecloth.
Store in cool basement or bottom drawer of the fridge for at least a month. If it starts looking dry, sprinkle with rum.

If you have any rum left at the end of the recipe, you should have used more rum.

It's very rare that I actually laugh out loud at the computer. Thank you. :)

Being as I prefer equinoxes (equinocti?) to solstices, I'm either April or October. :)

Mincemeat, as sold commercially in the US, is generally the second product you described, dried fruit, with sugar and spices, generally sold in cans or jars, to put in pies.

Exactly. Except that I did not know, until I was an adult, that such a product existed. It strikes me as very odd, like selling an empty pie shell and calling it a pie. Why would you sell a product that only contains half its ingredients?

This product is derived from an older product, which was mince in the first sense (chopped up meat) combined with dried fruit, sugar, and brandy, also to put in pies.

Yes. Although to complicate matters, my mother's mince meat (which did contain dried apples and raisins in great quantity along with the meat and suet and whatnot) was so rich and flavorful that -- although she used it undiluted in mince-filled Christmas cookies -- she tended to "cut" it with applesauce when making pies.

Moose meat would suggest an old recipe from a rural area, where folks still hunt, and moose may be hunted and used for meat.

In my mother's hand, the recipe actually says "moose or beef or any red meat." Whether Mom originally had an older printed recipe or was doing it as taught, I don't know.

A poor farmer's substitute for ground beef, which would either have to be bought or be the result of butchering a farm animal.

I'll quibble gently here, since in most places where moose flourish, farms don't. Certainly in the part of Alaska where I grew up, moose were plentiful and farms were not, due to an inadequate growing season. Perhaps it's different in Maine or bits of Canada.

A more important quibble is that in my family at least, moose was never considered a substitute for beef. Quite the contrary; beef (frozen and imported via air freight) was considered a flavorless and expensive and generally inadequate substitute for moose, when moose could not be had. I've grown used to beef in my adulthood, but I still consider it rather bland.

'proper thin slices' As a card carrying Type 2 insulin pen weilding diabetic, I'm here to tell you that any slice of fruitcake is WAY too thin. The slice is for you, and the rest is for me.

You know we leos have to sleep after a meal.

A more important quibble is that in my family at least, moose was never considered a substitute for beef. Quite the contrary; beef (frozen and imported via air freight) was considered a flavorless and expensive and generally inadequate substitute for moose, when moose could not be had. I've grown used to beef in my adulthood, but I still consider it rather bland."

I was thinking back a few more generations. The moose range has been pushed north by increasing population, but they still get as far south as northern New York these days, which, 150-200 years ago, was heavily agricultural. Combine greater agriculture in the northern/northeastern states, and less population to drive them north, and you've got moose interfering with agriculture.

Leno's still alive, so I guess the fruitcake was still edible.

(via an old post at John & Belle Have A Blog that not only includes a good-sounding [except for the ack! ptui! citron] recipe for Black Fruitcake, but also introduces the useful word "indenstible".)

I believe what I made might have been the recipe listed as "Dark Fruitcake II" in the version I have now. At any rate the overview of the fruitcake section gives the right general info on approach (though it fails to adequately warn against junk candied fruit.)

My copy of JofC is a 1979 printing of the 1975 edition. No "Pork Chops Baked In Sour Cream". (Darn. Sounded good.)

Quarkstollen: Ingo’s lazy Recipe

Modified from: Dr. Oetkers ‘Weihnachtliches Backen’, page 22
The original recipe was doubled to 1000 g flour. The amount of ingredients can be changed according to availability and taste.
The fruit-mixture can be prepared ahead of time (days):
In a bowl combine:

Oz Gram
0.5 oz/ 250 g Currents or red raisins
1.0 lb/ 500 g White raisins
0.5 lb/ 250 g Candied Fruits
½ cup Rum

This mixture should soak until used, may be used right away or kept covered for several days until to be used.

On day of baking: Mix the following ingredients:

Oz Gram
2.5 lb/ 1000 g Flour
0.7 lb/ 300 g Ground almonds
2 packages Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt
½ tsp Ground cardamom
½ tsp Ground Muscat

(Ursula's note: the packages of baking powder are the Dr. Oetker brand packets, which are sold in the German food section of the ethnic section of the grocery store. About a teaspoon per packet, I think. Muscat is, I belive, nutmeg.)

Mix in Food Processor: in given order, thoroughly mixing after each addition:

Oz Gram
3 quarters/ 350 g Butter or Margarine
0.8 oz/ 350 g Sugar
4 Eggs
2 tsp Almond Extract
2 tsp Lemon Extract
1 lb Cottage cheese, fine curd

(Ursula's note: by "3 quarters butter" he means three sticks of butter, three quarters of a US box.)
Mix:

1. Blend ingredients in flour bowl well
2. Add butter mixture and gently mix with some of the flour
3. Add the fruit mixture, cover with flour, then mix with a strong spoon until well mixed.
4. Then knead with hands into a ball
5. Put on a floured board or table, keep kneading, if dough is too soft, add flour, if too hard, add a few drops of liquid.
6. Cut ball up into desired sizes, form into loaves.
a. If a standard loaf is desired, grease a flat rectangular pan, cover with wax paper or parchment, put loaf on it.
b. If a narrow bread-like loaf is desired, grease loaf-pan, cover inside with wax paper or parchment, put loaf into it.
7. Bake at 350F in pre-heated oven.
8. A big loaf may take up to one hour. Smaller loafs may take longer.
9. Tip:
a. Set timer for 40 minutes, check if done
b. Continue baking with timer set into 5 or 10 min. Intervals.
10. While the loaves are still warm,
a. Brush with melted butter
b. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

The Stollen tastes best when it had some weeks rest to have the flavors meld together. Eventually, sprinkle with more powdered sugar to revitalize the looks.

Pork Chops Baked in Sour Cream
4 Servings

Preheat oven to 350 degrees [F].
Dredge:
4 loin pork chops: 1/2 inch thick
with:
Seasoned flour or bread crumbs
Insert in each chop:
1 clove
Brown lightly in a little hot pork fat or lard. Place in a baking dish. Combine, heat, and pour over the meat:
1/2 cup water or stock
1/2 bay leaf
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup cultured sour cream
(1/4 teaspoon summer savory)
Bake the chops covered for about 1 hour.

Serge (117), if a regular citron looks like Ben Grimm, which superhero does Buddha's Hand Citron look like?

TexAnne (120), the non-Tuscans who sold me citrons at an informal roadside fruit stand in Italy called them something like "cedra".

P J (124), citron-the-melon gets its rind candied just like the citrus fruit.

Ny Martin (128), thank you for the amendments, and do please come back sometime.

Arwen (131), I'm afraid I'm completely useless to you -- I make my own. It's not hard. Honest.

If you can't get into that idea, try Trader Joe's on 14th Street, east of Union Square.

Bruce (154), that piece about the fruitcake sounds like one of Jo's stories:

"The cake rests in a glass bowl, covered by a glass top. A large raisin and what might be a clove are visible among the brown mass -- Ford says it's fossilized -- that emits a pleasant odor of spices.

Its baker died in Berkey, Ohio, in 1879 and the cake remained untouched for 85 years.

Not much is known about the origin of the cake; even the recipe is lost."

The ladies at the checkout lines are always puzzled by suet, and ask me what you can do with it. I tell them you can hang a piece out for the winter birds, or shred it fine for steamed puddings and dumplings; or, like me, you can use it when you cook beef. A cheap hanger steak cooked at high temperature in a bit of beef dripping makes a good supper.

Thanks to my butcher's largesse, I now have five half-pint containers of rendered beef fat in my freezer. I doubt I'll get through them in a year.

I see a definite resemblance to this fellow.

Um. No.

Mrs. NH: I will investigate my neighborhood sources for Citron and BH Citron. If I manage to put hands thereupon, I would be willing to trade (through channels) for home-rendered suet. Post with results of my investigation to follow.

There's one in Cook's Illustrated (three flavors), but I can't (off the top of my head) remember if it's the Holiday Baking issue or the one with the lemons on the front cover that's just about to hit the newsstand.

My favorite cookie dough for the elaborate projects is my grandmother's lebkuchen, minus the fruit and nuts (and oblaten), hardened for days.

It is with delight that I read your instructions for candying the BHC, I *don't* have to do the change the water business? Great! (I'd planned to follow Joy of Cooking's recipe.)

For those who might be interested in growing their own citron, Logee's Greenhouses (www.logees.com) carries both the BHC and the Ertog plants ($10.95 each). The added bonus is that citrus blossoms have a heavenly aroma.

If anyone want's my Grandmother's mother's fruitcake recipe, let me know and I'll either email or post it.

Thena #146: Give a good stir, recover and ignore a couple more days. When I read this line, I honestly spent a few seconds wondering what you had to recover from...rum fumes, maybe? It's perfectly clear what you mean; my brain was just playing tricks on me.

I've just returned from a stay in a small hotel in Eberstadt, where they served stollen as part of the breakfast buffet, which was rather wonderful. Brought back a stollen labelled Dr. Oetkers' Stollen, wonder if it uses the recipe as above.

In the BC (before children) days, we used to make Christmas puddings that were fed brandy for months or years, then ignited with a bit more brandy before serving. The oldest we tried had two years' worth of sousing in it and it was delicious.

Synchronicity strikes again. Mom said the fruits were very large, about a pound each. I knew that Ponderosa lemons get very large, but I've never seen a fresh citron, so I had no idea as to size.

I'm still hoping to find a local source, maybe Whole Foods or Trader Joes.

An alternative is the Baker's Catalog, by the folks who produce King Arthur Flour.

Click to listen, and hang on until the end when the scientifically oblivious questions of the NPR interviewer seem to drive Alton to either mild hysteria or despair.

But wait! The folks at Hanger One Vodka would like someone to candy 1000 pounds of Buddha's Hand Citron for an upcoming promotion. Maybe they'd let you keep some?

Sharon M. @ #183:
"But wait! The folks at Hanger One Vodka would like someone to candy 1000 pounds of Buddha's Hand Citron for an upcoming promotion. Maybe they'd let you keep some?"

[whisper]
Go on, Teresa. Call the vodka people. It's only half a ton. You know you want to....
[/whisper]

This one may be a bit more useful for American cooks, as she uses eating apples rather than Bramleys or other cookers, and substitutes margarine for suet. OTOH, I've never heard of rum in mincemeat, it's usually just brandy.

This one and this one both have figs in them, which is a bit odd, but they are measured in cups, which may be helpful.

A few notes:
You can leave the almonds out if necessary.
You can reduce or leave out the fat (make it up with applesauce or something, maybe) if the pie is going to be eaten hot. If it's for cold cutting, or if you're doing a lot of little mince pies to give to guests, like cookies, the fat keeps it moist.
Teetotallers can leave out brandy, although it doesn't keep as well then; you can make up the liquid with orange juice (in fact you can probably tell by comparing the recipes that you can vary the ingredients to taste. If you leave out vine fruits and spice it isn't really mincemeat any more, though, IMO- call it "Christmas fruit pie"!)
"Sultanas" are golden raisins.
Put in a bit less sugar than called for and taste for sweetness (cook a spoonful to try it if you've put the suet in already!)
Some people put a little bit of wine vinegar in for an extra zing.
The components of mixed spice vary, but it always has cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg; sometimes allspice, sometimes mace, sometimes coriander, rarely ginger.
Demerara sugar is crystals of brown sugar a millimetre or so large, caster sugar is white sugar with crystals a bit smaller than table sugar, muscovado sugar is dark unrefined sugar. Use the kind you have on hand.

Another nice thing to do with mincemeat is make the sort of bar cookies with a layer of slightly crumbly dough pressed into a tin, a layer of fruit filling, and another layer of dough crumbled on top. Especially if the dough is a moist one with oats in it.

Her meat pie turned out not to be so difficult (recipe, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, down a ways on this Thanksgiving roundup), so maybe next year I'll give mince a try. After I ask my folks if it had meat in or not.

Recommendations?

I grind the whole spices, mix them in about those proportions, and then put whatever's left over in a small container in the freezer.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, that a nutmeg hangover is not a pleasant experience. Do not radically increase the proportion of nutmeg, especially if you are like me and tend to double or triple the amount of mixed spice called for by the recipe. Just ask the Galactic Gourmet...

Ny -- good to see you here. Cultivate your audacity.

Fragano -- Appleton is definitely nice stuff, with good flavor, and not sweet -- but I don't think of it as being a 'dark' rum at all. More like a 'normal' rum... maybe my standards are skewed. Still, it would probably make a pretty nice buttercream filling. I'd try it, for sure.

Xopher -- I can't vouch for it, but you might want to think about something like Gosling's Black Seal. I've only had it once, under adverse circumstances, so I can't speak to its sweetness or lack therof. Dark, it is.

All this talking about fruitcake made me go to the pantry (where I currently store my cookbooks) and see whether I could find the recipe my mother made for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, my copy of the "Golden Wattle" cookbook is still somewhere in a box (or hiding in one of the myriad piles of stuff around the house) which means I'm not able to start off a (very late) fruit cake of my own. *sigh*

Regarding the gumdrops in fruitcakes: are gumdrops the US name for fruit jellies (ie little bits of solid gelatine with fruit-ish flavours)? We have something similar here in .au - it's called the "artificial cherry" which pops up in cheap mixed dried fruit mixtures. Basically, instead of using real glace cherries (or leaving them out altogether and letting you add your own), the manufacturers put in these little round blobs of jelly in red or green, and call them "artificial cherries". Ruddy 'orrible, to be honest.

Anyway, must rush - I have to see whether I can find a good recipe for boiled fruit cake in the cookbooks I have available.

I would expect so. In the UK, I think they might be called jelly babies (my impression from Tom Baker as Dr. Who). I've bought the same sort of thing, in the shape of worms.

A cake related application (done by a friend for her brother's birthday): cut jelly worms in half and imbed them in the frosting as if they're wriggling out; works best with chocolate frosting (it's the mud).

Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions.

The color is darker than a gold rum but lighter than a black rum (about halfway between Bacardi Gold and Myers). Mixes well, yet is perfectly pleasant served neat. 84 proof. Moderately priced.

* I have no idea of the truth of this marketing claim. On their website,** they claim that the company's founder got the distribution rights and the blending formula from the British Admiralty. In exchange for this, a portion of all sales goes to the Royal Navy Sailor's Fund.

** If your employer's Web-blocking service is anything like mine, don't click this link at work.

Regards from one of your worldcon kaffeklatchers.

If you're interested in citron, we just pulled one off our (wee little dwarf) citron tree and candied it. We could send you about a cup o' this, priority, if you like.

Or, there are a couple more on the tree, still pretty green.

A gardening person could do worse (yes I'm a native Minnesotan and I talk like that even when enthusiastic) than to wander over to the Four Winds Growers website and drool over the varieties they grow -- http://fourwindsgrowers.com/variety_list.html
Lise and I will vouch for these folks; we have a few of their trees in pots, thriving.

best to you and Patrick,
-Ruth Temple

The best rum I've tasted is Matusalem, a Cuban rum which is impossible to find in the US for technical reasons, but that's quite sweet. It is, however, very smooth.

Victor $ #197: True, Appleton is a lot lighter than Myers and Charley's.

As the poet says:

Oh some are fond of red wine, and some are fond of white,
And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight;
But rum alone's the tipple, and the heart's delight
Of the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some are fond of Spanish wine, and some are fond of French,
And some'll swallow tay and stuff fit only for a wench;
But I'm for right Jamaica till I roll beneath the bench,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some are for the lily, and some are for the rose,
But I am for the sugar-cane that in Jamaica grows;
For it's that that makes the bonny drink to warm my copper nose,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some are fond of fiddles, and a song well sung,
And some are all for music for to lilt upon the tongue;
But mouths were made for tankards, and for sucking at the bung,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some are fond of dancing, and some are fond of dice,
And some are all for red lips, and pretty lasses' eyes;
But a right Jamaica puncheon is a finer prize
To the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some that's good and godly ones they hold that it's a sin
To troll the jolly bowl around, and let the dollars spin;
But I'm for toleration and for drinking at an inn,
Says the old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

Oh some are sad and wretched folk that go in silken suits,
And there's a mort of wicked rogues that live in good reputes;
So I'm for drinking honestly, and dying in my boots,
Like an old bold mate of Henry Morgan.

--John Masefield

Given that I live in the UK and am not likely to visit the US until Denvention, I'm a little perplexed as to the utility of any contribution I can make.

I'm presuming I'm not the only commenter on this thread to be invited to the party.

I am writing to let people know that MapMuse.com has recently introduced interactive mapping of places to get holiday fruitcakes across the US. There are presently over 20 fruitcake suppliers located on the MapMuse maps.

The idea is for fruitcake suppliers, and their customers, to build upon what we have started by adding information about their fruitcakes to the maps. The following information can be provided for each fruitcake maker- the name, descriptive text, a photo, contact information, and a link to a website.

That's part of it. There are a few phrases later on ("holiday fruitcake") that suggest this wasn't a mailing auto-created by a robot. Weird....

Anyone interested in a recipe for white fruitcake (cherries and pineapple, no raisins)?

We could test this by having a discussion of something really peculiar that would have no chance of pre-existing. Like erotic weasel shaving, or mammoth recipes using Velveeta (tm).

BTW, I was doing a bit of channel-surfing last night, and ended up at a Food Network show where the host was visiting Gethsemani to see how their fruitcake was made. I've never seen quite that many tube pans in one place, ever. And the spigot marked "Bourbon"--priceless.

Perhaps we should combine the weasels and the Velveeta?

It's not quite as strange as the time I posted on my blog saying that I wasn't interested in lottery winnings/international financial movements and immediately started to get Shanghai Silk Embroidery Spam, but it comes close.

@215 Stefan - Other factors for your experiment:

1. The Map people would want some sort of supplier/producer to sponsor or advertise. (Weasel supplier? Mammoth producer?)

2. We might also want to complain about the decline in quality/difficulty in getting hold of whatever it is ("Those weasels aren't as erotic as they used to be"; "Even speciality stores don't seem to stock Mammoth any more")

3. Er... no that's all I can think of.

You too, Neil?

It's ETROG (or ethrog), not ERTOG.

You want some etrogim (pl) cheap, find an Orthodox synagogue, and go on the morning of the 7th day of the holiday Sukkot (Tabernacles). That's when we're done with them, and would like to find a good use for them. That should give you enough time to ferment the fruitcake.

Only after they've been properly peeled and brined. The Velveeta(tm) can be combined with fire-roasted jalepenos for increased piquancy before applying to the weasels.

I'm looking forward to the map of CheezyWeasel suppliers in the US!

Only if you include the peppers. Consider the "jalapeno popper" much beloved of chain bars.

Mind you, Larry #223, the addition of something peppery is a necessity if Velveeta is involved.

Teresa's main post, at the top of the thread, has a link to Jo Walton's Cousin Beryl's Fruitcake recipe. (It's in British measurements, tho, with temperature in Centigrade and measurements by weight rather than volume. I don't recall if anyone in the thread has posted an Americanized version.)

Several other recipes have been posted in the thread, and there are quite a few links to various recipes elsewhere on the Internet. Was there a particular one you wanted?

If you're determined to go the pack-weasel route, be sure to read Across the Andes by Weasel, by Anton Clordis. Lots of good tips for the inexperienced weaselpacker.

The problem was that the plastic wrappers on mine dissolved into the chocolate in a couple of weeks. I think this was a widespread problem, and possibly related to the alcohol content, because the next year, the chocolates weren't nearly as potent.

joann@216 - A tap marked "bourbon"? Where do I get one of those? Or several?

It's interesting that you should mention the PAK 103mm recoiless weasel. Anton Clordis was from Austria-Hungary, and as a junior officer during the Great War, he had experimented with weasel-borne munitions. It was these early experiences that led him to undertake the Andean expedition in the antipodal summer of 1921-1922. Interviewed by the British press at the conclusion of the expedition, he was asked if he had any plans for the weasels. The polyglot Cordis said, "Yes. I'd like to shoot the little buggers." It was an error in translating English idiom to German that led directly to the development of the PAK 103mm recoiless weasel.

During the Sepoy Rebellion, as we all recall, the use of the 1853 Enfield rifle was a major issue due to the use of either lard (pork fat, offensive to Muslims) or tallow (beef fat, offensive to Hindus) on the wadding.

A minor Army officer at the time, Cpl Atherton Fellowhand, began development at that point of the Fellowhand Unrifled Weasel Musket, using an alternative approach to rifling the barrel of a gun: teaching weasels to spin midair.

This revolutionary idea still required the weasels to fit very precisely in the barrels of the guns. Fellowhand's solution was to shave the weasels and coat them with an inexpensive mix of cheese and candle wax which he named in honour of his fiancee, the lovely socialite Velveeta Thrumwhistle.

Unfortunately, the fair Velveeta married Lord Overly-Hyphenated, Atherton Fellowhand died of a broken heart, and the single prototype Fellowhand Unrifled Weasel Musket made its way to Austria-Hungary, where it fell into the hands of the Clordis family.

In other words, Clordis was merely planning a trip home for some hunting after his expedition when he was interviewed.

Sweet's catalog, I'd say, if that still exists? This monastery has a *very* industrial-strength kitchen, or at least fruitcake-producing area. Think "factory floor". There was this very large spigot embedded in an industrial-gray panel, with an engraved plastic label just like you see for any industrial process. Only it read "Bourbon." I suppose you could create your own ...

Are you sure that HM Weasels were using weasels as projectiles? I was under the impression the soldiers actually were weasels, and used a variety of doormouse as a projectile. Or it might have been pygmy mammoths - the historical record is unclear.

Even if you are correct, Fellowhand retains some distinction for the shaving of the weasels, teaching them to pirouette midair, and of course the use of Velveeta.

(Glad I checked this thread again. As I guessed would happen, most of the postings have wandered delightfully off-topic by now.)

You've tickled my memory a bit, and I've done some digging.

Apparently the use of weasels predates firearms. There's a reference to the Parthians using them in one of the battles leading up to Carrhae in 53 BC. It seems that Crassus was wounded by a flying weasel shot from a Parthian bow (Crassus mustela volucre sauciatus, nam eas arco iaculantur Parthiarum). This may have weakened him before his final battle.

I can't currently trace the source, but I seem to recall that the early traders in gunpowder from the Silk Road may have passed through what is now Iran. Did they meet the Parthian weasel-archers? Is this where the idea of the weasel firearm originates? I have some memory of reading something about it, but that was long ago, and in another country*.

I am well out of my field here. Does anyone know anything more?

-----
* And besides, the Dench is wed.

Persian weasel-archers (even Parthian ones), I had not heard of. However, there is a passage of the Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosophical work, which is relevant:

"Our teacher Mozi tells us that the superior man will not use the weasels of battle. He says this not because he hates weasels, but because the superior man will not expose the common people to unnecessary dangers. And therefore, our teacher Mozi tells us to avoid the use of weasels."

This suggests a very ancient use of military weasels, though whether as troops, missiles, or instruments of divination is not clear.

Meanwhile, in Germany development had taken an entirely different path. Encouraged by the success of the 32 mm squeezebore in Spain, the Wehrmacht issued first the 79mm PAK (Polkatz Angrief Kanone) and then the 103mm "Nertz". At the war's end they were working on a 207mm weapon with a HESH (High Energy Stoat Hurling) warhead that might have posed a severe threat to Allied armour had the round not required at least three mutually attracted weasels for aerodynamic stability. As it was, it had potential as area denial ordnance, but accurate targeting proved impossible.

"But what of the very old fruitcakes?" he asked. "Where do they go when their shrines are all burnt?"

"Hush, baba, hush," his mother said, her voice low. "They turn into weasel-wallahs. All know it. Now sleep, and be glad the jungle hath returned thee."

Shame it didn't go into the innovative private rocketry work recreating Dr. John Dee's animal husbandry experiments, using the larger-scale resources of John W. Parsons, the produce of the local Pasadena raisin industry, freshly-cast solid fuel rocket cores, several dozen mustelids, and the services of L. Ron Hubbard, as amaneuse....

New Publication for 2007

Weasels at War Weekly

This unique magazine charts the use of mustelids in conflict, from scientific recreations of neolithic domesticated hunting badgers, through the WWII Nazi-SuperWeasel, to the adoption of the Weasel War Dance as a training method by most modern armies. Week by week Weasels at War builds up to an irreplaceable resource on fighting ferrets! Part One comes with your own Weasel Containment System*. Not suitable for under 12s.

* From the picture, this appears to be a cardboard tube, perhaps from wrapping paper.

Ripen at cellar temperature (55-60F), do not wrap in plastic. I don't add likker to my fruitcake, but even so, it does taste better after a couple of weeks. It rarely lasts a couple of months, unless I forget that it's there. I usually wrap in muslin and put single layers into cake tins with apple wedges.

My first fruitcake in years? Not ripe yet, and I didn't cut the candied fruit, and I cut it too soon, and I used pound cake mix.

Best to try again, with more rum, real dried fruit I like, and homemade pound cake batter, and patience.

*well, Irish cooking anyway

Sylvia's Fruitcake Cookies
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
4 eggs, beaten slightly
3 scant Tbsp milk
3 scant tsp baking soda
3 cups sifted flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup whisky or bourbon
1 lb pecan pieces
1/2 lb pecan halves
1/4 lb red and green candied cherries, chopped
1/4 lb rean and gree candied pineapple, chopped
1 box white raisins

Cream butter and sugar; mix well.
Add beaten eggs and mix.
Add milk, whisky and spices; beat well.
Sift flour and soda together and reserve 1/2 of mixture.
Mix nuts and fruit in a separate bowl and add half of flour mixture; mix until well coated.
Add rest of flour to egg mixture and mix well.
Add fruit mixture and any remaining flour.
Drop by teaspoons on greased cookie sheets.
Bake at 250F for 30 minutes.

You can make only half a recipe.

This cookie recipe is an excuse for pecans.

Exactly. Nasty. It's what the puritanical chocolate companies put in their chocolate assortments, to demonstrate that there must be some evil hiding in anything that seems all good.

i will happily take all your marzipan.

mmmmmmmm, marzipan.

Marzipan tastes exactly like almond paste. Which is what it is.

Which is nasty. Don't make me go vandalize a Wikipedia article to prove it.

Oh, wait, I don't need to. Quote:

The Indian sweet Badam Barfi, also made from Almonds, tastes similar to Marzipan.

See? Bad, barfy. What more can I say?

How did SNL's spoof of Smucker's go?
"Nuns-being-eaten-alive-by-rats... With a name like that, it's got to be good."

*I worked at a auto service station for a while, and the heavy-duty hand cleaner was almond scented. Yuck.

The vets in the crowd will be breaking out in a sweat by now, since of course this fruitcake, as most are, was full of raisins, which are horrifyingly toxic to dogs.

(Monty seems to be fine; we took him to the emergency vet that night after we figured out what had happened, and they put him on an IV for a couple of days and watched his bloodwork for Bad Stuff. Very very scary though, and as my wife pointed out to Facebook friends the other night, we've become a PSA now. So, yeah: Don't give the dog raisins, kids.)

Of course, now several people have pointed to this as further evidence that Fruitcake Is Evil. Whereas, now that I'm not sick with worry over the whole thing, I'm starting to wish I had that fruitcake now.

Not bad at all for $3.00.

"Used Food Store"?

Not out of date, but out of season or no longer welcome on the shelves. Example: The plug was pulled on the beloved Mother's cookie brand last year. Not wanting the shelf space devoted to the brand to slowly go empty, they sent the packages to a Used Food Store. Where I bought them really cheap just yesterday!

You can find Used Food Store chains all over. I didn't make that term up. I heard it first from a co-worker, referring to the Grocery Outlet store in Beaverton, OR.

Then out of the blue my parents referred to a store near their vacation trailer in Florida as a Used Food Store.

You mean those whacking great soft cookies I used to get out of vending machines, a mainstay of my graduate career, are no more? (Mourns.)

I said to a couple of people inside: "Y'know, once upon a time there used to be a holiday called Thanksgiving...."

If you are willing to send me the recipe, I could make and mail to you?