I like fruitcake. But admitting that in public can be painful. Mention your fondness for fruitcake at a holiday party and before you can say "chopped walnuts" some would-be comedian will snicker in your ear: "You know there is only one fruitcake and it gets passed around, as a gift, from house to house."
I don't think this is funny. And it certainly isn't original. This solo-fruitcake theory was proposed a long time ago by Calvin Trillin, who can be a pretty humorous writer when he isn't attacking fruitcake. Trillin's fruitcake polemic, along with his earlier food writing, has recently been reissued in a three-book set called "The Tummy Trilogy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25).
Early in this holiday season I called Trillin in New York and tried to get him to recant. He refused. But he admitted he needed to revise part of his theory. He said recent research has indicated that the original, and some would say only, fruitcake, appeared somewhere in Michigan in 1878. This first-sighting was years earlier than he had previously reported, Trillin said.
Other than changing the date of the first sighting, Trillin remained firmly anti-fruitcake. He accused fruitcake of being "indigestible," something that sits there "in your stomach, like a doorknob," taking up valuable stomach space, space that could be devoted to foods worth eating. He said he would not even consider putting a piece of what fruitcake lovers call "the real good stuff" in his hand. "That would be like trying to convince a bear that if he put a different kind of poison berry in his paw, things would be all right . . ." Trillin said. "I know what is good for me and what isn't."
Fruitcake comes in handy around the holidays, he said, "as a centerpiece."
Talking about fruitcake with Trillin was a downer. It was like talking about the future of the Democratic Party with Bob Dole.
To pick myself up, I called a few folks who believe as I do, that fruitcake is the staff of holiday life. First I called Shirley, who works on a holiday baking hot line ([800] 782-9606) operated by the Land O' Lakes butter people out in Arden Hills, Minn. Even though hot-line etiquette did not allow Shirley to divulge her last name, we chatted like old friends.
Shirley said that lots of people still bake their own fruitcakes. When the bakers run into trouble, they call Shirley. Sometimes the trouble is with an old recipe that is missing an ingredient and Shirely talks them through the recipe. Often callers want to know if you can freeze a fruitcake. The answer, Shirley said, is yes. She still has a fruitcake from last year sitting in her freezer, she said.
Shirley and I agreed that a fruitcake is the antithesis of modern cuisine.
Next I talked with Ted Pavlos, who along with his father, Charles, and his sister Marina, operates Baltimore's Jeppi Nut Co. on High Street. Pavlos told me that the annual pilgrimage of fruitcake bakers to the family's aromatic store and roasting house was under way. "It usually is a family affair," Pavlos said. "A carload of them come from Baltimore, from the Eastern Shore, from Northern Virginia, even from Delaware."
These home bakers, whom Pavlos describes as "an older clientele," buy in bulk. Five-pound boxes of glazed fruit. One-pound sacks of walnuts and pecans. "They know exactly what they want," Pavlos said. "They have been making fruitcake for years."
By mid-December, the ingredients picked up by the Jeppi Nut customers have been transformed into homemade treasures that are spending their final days soaking in liqueur.
Eaters who have a hunger for fruitcake but lack the resources to bake their own, have to rely on store-bought fruitcakes. Some of the better ones come from bakeries in Texas, a state that is full of nuts. A step above the Texas fruitcakes are what I call the monk-made cakes. These fruitcakes are made by members of religious orders.
One source of monk-made fruitcakes is the Cistercian Abbey in Berryville, Va., near the Maryland-Virginia line. The makers, monks who are called Cistercians or Trappists, lead lives of prayer, meditation and work. Much of the day is spent in silence. Part of their daily work, from February to September, is baking.fruitcakes.
In previous years the. Abbey's telephone rang off the hook with orders for fruitcakes. So this year, in an effort to preserve monastic life, the monks are taking no orders over the telephone. Instead, a fax machine has been installed and orders must be faxed in. (The number is (703) 955-4006.). Each cake weighs 2 1/4 pounds and costs $21.
This year the monks made 28,000 fruitcakes -- 5,000 more than last year's sold-out supply. Customers who get their orders in after the Christmas fruitcakes are sold out have a new option. According to a monastery spokesman, if customers will wait a few months, the monks will happily send them a fruitcake for that next big fruitcake. holiday, Easter.