JUDY’S FRUITCAKE

What’s not to like about a good fruitcake? When I was a child, everybody loved it. Now almost nobody claims to like it. I still do. I seemed to be the only one of a dozen people who confessed to liking fruitcake when Judy, a co-worker volunteer at Mama’s Kitchen in San Diego, brought one she’d been given for Christmas to our regular Monday morning work session. What happened to everybody else? I began to wonder and decided to give it some thought.

I “Googled” fruitcake and found some interesting bits of information: The earliest reference to it goes back to Roman times, but it seemed to come into its own in northern and Western Europe, and especially in England, when dried fruits from the Mediterranean began to arrive.

I think I found the reason I still like fruitcake, a subliminal reason perhaps, something probably carried in my genes. In the early 18th century, fruitcake (called plum cakes) was outlawed entirely throughout Continental Europe. These cakes were considered to be “sinfully rich.” By the end of the 18th century there were laws restricting the use of plumb cake.

If I were in the business of making and selling fruitcakes, I’d try to get a law passed making them illegal. I'd have them smuggled across the border from Mexico. They’d sell like hotcakes.