Ah, the Christmas fruit cake. The dense, dark cake stuffed with fruit and nuts is often considered unpalatable and indigestible, the punchline of numerous Christmas jokes. But how did such a sweet dessert develop such a rotten reputation?
Fruit cake is a traditional cake made with candied and dried fruit, nuts and spices. The fact that it is generally soaked in spirits like brandy, bourbon or rum contributes to its reputation for having a long shelf life.
While the fruitcake as we know it was probably first baked in the Middle Ages, there are references to similar cakes going back as far as Roman times.
At first, the cakes were mainly filled with nuts. When sugar became more widely available, candied preserved fruits were added. The addition of sugar made the dessert so “sinfully rich” that the church briefly banned fruitcake in the 1700s.
Fruit cakes vary by region, from the German stollen and Italian panettone to the more cake-like loaves of England and the United States.
In the 1950s, fruit cake was considered a favorite Christmas gift. So how did a dessert that had been beloved for so long develop such a bum rep so quickly? Some people blame comedian Johnny Carson, host of The Tonight Show, for turning the tide with a series of seasonal jokes ridiculing the venerable dessert.
