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I have written previously about the Christmas Cake -
the deep cultural resonance of
butter by the brick, of sugar by the tonne, of eggs by the dozen, of apricot jam,
nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and above all of dried and glace fruit
-
It is the fruit that
makes the cake. In 2010 I wrote -
"In August or September you gather your fruit. A
pound or two of raisins, the same of sultanas, another of currants, candied
citrus peel, glace cherries, crystallized ginger and pineapple, glace apricots
and peaches and pears and figs and oranges and kiwi-fruit and quangdongs and
cantaloupe (if you can get it) all chopped into little pieces no larger than a
raisin. When you have a lasagna pan overflowing with sweetly aromatic fruit,
you begin to add the alcohol. Slowly, pouring and turning and stirring and
resting, over the course of a week you pour in bottle of brandy - and then
another. As the fruit swells, you move the overflow into another great bowl and
tend to both. The house smell thick and alcoholic -
"Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."
"Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."
I baked a Christmas
Cake last year, for our first Christmas in Chile, but Chile doesn't have
much of a glace fruit tradition. Chile's confectionery heritage runs mostly to
German kuchen and dulce de leche, or manjar,
as it is know locally - a thick, sweet, sticky mess of boiled evaporated milk
and sugar cooked into in everything from wafer crackers (alfajores) to
croissants (media luna) to layer cakes (torta mil hojas).
I began looking for
fruit in October, just after we arrived
in Chile. Raisins and sultanas came easily, and diligent searching resulted in a single packet of glace apricots from a little
Armenian import shop in the comuna (suburb) of Patronato, but as for the rest of it -
Home-country
traditions mean even more when you're an expatriate far from home. I had the bit between my teeth now, and I wasn't
stopping for anything. The Australian
shops I'd worked with the previous year wouldn't ship internationally, European outfits would only ship wholesale, and North American
offerings were slim. Calling in favors
from anyone I knew to be traveling up and down from Canada and the USA, I shipped myself tubs of glace cherries and
candied orange peel and pineapple -
Christmas had passed
by, but that was no matter. This Cake was
going to happen. By mid-January I had
collected all the fruits I could, and by mid February they 'd been boozed up
till they sweated out an alcoholic haze and the flies that blundered through
the window into our flat fell insensible in the kitchen doorway and never rose
again, but it was a scant and simple cake that I loaded into our oven -
And because I was
still learning its tricks and temprament, that dearly
bought cake came out over-baked: a
cinnamon, nutmeg and alcohol soaked charcoal briquette.
I didn't make a
cake, this year. All in all, it didn't
really seem worth the fuss. You can make
glace fruit yourself if you're so inclined, but it's a process that takes days
of boiling and ends in a perpetually sticky kitchen that sort of leaks into
your other living spaces, and I have quite enough of that with Mr Tabubil when he decides he needs home-made marshmallows. A mixing bowl full of unset marshmallow tends
to work its way out of the kitchen into every single room in the house - like silly string, only
rather more tenacious, and I've washed the stuff out of my hair often enough
this past year that I'm not taking on any more sticky -
This post, then, is
requiem of sorts - the story of the last time we didn't have a fruitcake for
Christmas. That was the year that I was
thirteen, the year when the icing on the Christmas cake went wrong. The year we were living in California, and
couldn’t find the traditional white royal icing in the local shops. The year of our really big Christmas party,
when all of our expatriate Australian big-talk and honor was on the line.
You can make white
royal icing yourself, if you've
sufficient time and masochism. The day before the party, Mum and I set to work. It was a tremendous job; tenting the kitchen in old sheets, we kneaded
sugar and egg whites and glycerin until the room was coated in a glistening
sheen and we were just unspeakable.
Nibbling hugely the
whole time, we stirred and shaped and molded, and four hours later, we had
one fine looking cake - complete with a little
silver mirror on top for a lake and a couple of miniature pine trees around it
for ambiance and a border of little silver-painted sugar balls spelling out
wishes for a Merry Christmas. Also one
kitchen that looked like it had passed
through an icing-sugar supernova, and one empty bottle of glycerin whose label
looked, on belated reflection, subtly… wrong.
We'd found it in the
back of the pantry- a battered bottle with the label peeling off - it had looked
mostly right and we used it without thinking.
Now, in the bright glow of the aftermath, the label appeared to have a couple
of significant spelling errors, and in Big Bold Black Letters, right
underneath, a jolly motto reading "If ingested, contact your Nearest
Poison Control Center immediately."
It was all over the cake. It was all over the kitchen. It was all over the insides of us. Burping nervously, we grabbed for the
telephone directory and dialed.
The lady on the
telephone at the Poison Control Center was professionally reassuring. We'd be fine, but did we have more than one
lavatory in the house? She was very glad
to hear it, because in about four hours, we'd both be becoming rather intimate with the fittings for the next
day or so.
She didn't even giggle. Hanging up the
phone, Mum sighed and looked at me, and while she showered and rushed out to
the shops, I stripped the cake of its gorgeous iced topping and re-laid the
floor with fresh sheets. And we did all
of it, all over again. We never did find
out where the bottle had come from.
We were living in
California that year, and although we'd stripped the cake bare and even gone so
far at to shave off the upper half-inch of cake, just in case, we thought we'd
better bow to the local culture and insist that all our guests sign limited liability waivers before they tried it.
Not one single guest
took a single bite of our Christmas cake that year. Every one of them declined the privilege.
We found it hurtful.
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