Tasting History 水果蛋糕的歷史｜The History of Fruitcake

聖誕果凍蛋糕可能是所有聖誕節烘焙品中最荒謬和荒謬的一款 但並不是每一次都如此 事實上,在美國大戰期間 像我今天做的那款果凍蛋糕 是一項最受歡迎的禮品 送給你的藍色或灰色男孩們 所以感謝Trade Coffee贊助這個視頻 因為我們製作果凍蛋糕 來自大戰期間 這次是《品嚐歷史》 果凍蛋糕如同我們今天所知 它不是用麵粉製成 而是用烘焙粉或烘焙桿 在中十九世紀中成為流行 不用麵粉製成 使烘焙更容易 但它仍然保存了相當長時間 基本上,果凍蛋糕是蛋糕的硬體 它可以保存好幾個月或甚至幾年烘焙後 這也許是為什麼它成為美國大戰期間 最受歡迎的禮品 事實上,當時最受歡迎的食譜來源 是Goody's女士書 她們的食譜不是在聖誕節 而是在六月 所以它可以為聖誕節準備 它是為普通的果凍蛋糕 兩杯牛奶 兩顆蘑菇 兩顆糖 六個雞蛋 兩小匙的蘇打 少許鹽 一磅桃子切碎和磨碎 一磅柑橘 半磅柑橘 麵粉足夠製作 像薑餅一樣濃稠 味道適中 烘焙在三層或烤箱 果凍蛋糕非常濃稠 而且可以比較乾 所以在烘焙過程中 可以在蛋糕上加一些柑橘或柑橘 讓它吸收 讓它保持乾淨和濕滑 但即使如此 你可能想要有些東西準備 例如一杯咖啡 來自今天的贊助商Trade Trade是一間咖啡服務服務 擁有超過55個獨立烘焙機 來將新鮮烘焙咖啡送到你的門口 而咖啡是根據你的口味 和咖啡飲食習慣 例如這個巴西咖啡烘焙 來自Chandler Arizona的Pesciotto咖啡 它是甜和順滑 這正是我喜歡的咖啡 而現在Trade有一個選項 可以將咖啡的禮物 送給你生活中的咖啡愛好者 有一個數碼訂閱 所以它可以直接到他們的信箱 基本上你購買訂閱 你決定要花多少錢 他們收到訂閱 然後那個收到禮物的人 可以決定他們喜歡的咖啡 如果你的生活中的咖啡愛好者是你 那麼就像Parks and Rec說的一樣 做好自己 然後買一瓶免費咖啡 用任何訂閱購買 直接到drinktrade.com slashmaxmiller 然後買一瓶免費咖啡 用任何訂閱購買 你可以任何時候取消 或隨便你喜歡的訂閱 那是drinktrade.com slashmaxmiller 去買一瓶咖啡 去喝 旁邊你的果凍 你需要 一杯或227克的牛奶 一杯或235毫升的果凍 一杯或200克的糖 三個雞蛋 一茶匙 each of baking soda salt nutmeg mace and ginger a half teaspoon of allspice a half teaspoon of coriander one and a half teaspoons of cinnamon a half pound or 225 grams of raisins a half pound or 225 grams of currants a quarter pound or 113 grams of citron and three cups or 360 grams of flour And you'll notice that I'm only making half of the recipe that is called for in Goody's book because it's still going to make more fruit cake than you probably need. So first soak your raisins, currants and citron for a few minutes and then drain them and toss them with just a little flour. Doing this will help to stop all of the fruit from falling to the bottom of the cake and I learned this from you not you specifically but you the audience of Tasting History because a few years ago when I did the video on panettone all of my fruit fell to the bottom of the baked good and people were like if you put it in flour first then it will keep it up and help distribute it better so that's what I did and it seems that even in the 1860s people knew this. I didn't know it until very recently but in the 1860s people knew this because one period recipe calls for two pounds of washed currants rubbed in flour and mixed into the cake. Always learning new things. Anyway with the fruit floured whisk the salt, soda and spices all together with the rest of the flour and then beat the butter until it's nice and fluffy. Then add the sugar and cream them together until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the molasses and beat until fully incorporated and then add the eggs just one at a time mixing each egg in fully before you add the next and keep scraping down the sides and bottom of the bowl throughout this process. Then add a few spoonfuls of the flour and spice mixture and gently mix it in until just incorporated then add a few more and continue to mix this way until all of the flour has been added. Then add about a third of the fruit and mix it in by hand. All of this of course can actually be done by hand but if you are using a stand mixer for the first part of the recipe definitely switch to hand now so you don't over mix the flour and make it all gummy. Then continue to add in all the fruit and mix until it's all evenly incorporated. Then add the batter to two standardized size loaf pans which have been well greased with butter or other fat. They should be about half to two thirds full. Smooth the top as best as you can and then pop them in the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit about 150 Celsius for two hours and start checking it around 90 minutes by inserting a wooden skewer. If the skewer comes out clean then that means it's done. Also I wanted to share a question with you that I got a lot while I was out on book tour doing Q&A's and that was how many times do I practice each recipe? Well for the cookbook it was many, many times. I tested them all. I had my Patreon patrons test them all so they're perfect I would like to think but on the show usually it's a one and done thing. I try to follow the original historic recipe as closely as possible and then whatever comes from that is what I'm going to taste but sometimes especially with baked goods I know that I made a mistake because you know if it's supposed to be a cake and it turns out like a soup clearly I did something wrong. That's kind of what happened with this the first time that I tried it. I think I probably over beat the eggs and added a little too much soda because it just spilled out of the pan and all onto the bottom of the oven and it burned. It was horrible and yeah didn't look great. So yeah all of that to say if you ever make mistake in the kitchen don't sweat it just try, try again but hopefully since I made the mistake in this episode you won't have to recreate my mistake. The recipe that I'm giving you is fairly foolproof so you can just sit back, relax and listen to me talk about the history of the much hated and maligned fruitcake. Pitting down the origins of fruitcake is not so easy because the term really can refer to so many different things and it changes over time but the act of adding fruit to bread like products goes back to ancient times. The Sumerians had a sort of cake made with dates, raisins, and cheese that were a favorite at the palace of Ur but these were very much unlike any cake that we would know today as were the ancient Roman cakes that were made with barley and fruit and sweetened with honey and wine. Again nothing like a fruitcake today but it is possible that these fruit bread cake things gave rise to the later practices of adding fruit to different breads popular in the Middle East, North Africa and medieval Europe but still they didn't really look anything like fruitcake today. Some were sugar and flour mixed with different fruits and then boiled which is the precursor to today's figgy pudding or plum pudding and then there were those that were baked like the German Stollen or the Panforte from Tuscany But in these early forms of fruitcake the fruit was usually dried because that was the best way to preserve the fruit. You pick a cherry, you got like three days to eat it before it goes bad but if you dry that cherry out you can use it in baked goods throughout the year. The other way to preserve fruit was with honey or sugar but especially in Europe in the Middle Ages sugar was so expensive that very few people could afford to do that. Sugar had to come all the way from the Far East or else some places in North Africa grew it and so getting enough to preserve fruit was not really an option for most people and nor was using a lot of spices because those also had to come from very far away but that all changed in the 16th and 17th century. All of a sudden a sudden being like 200 years all of a sudden the spices and sugar became more available because they could be grown in the New World which was considerably closer than the Far East. They were still luxury items but not so much so that you had to be nobility to afford them so it was during this time that more people began preserving their fruit in sugar and could bake cakes with spices. Recipes for these cakes begin appearing in cookbooks like La Varenne 1651, Le Patissier François which really gave birth to the modern pastry as we know it. In England Robert May published a recipe for an extraordinary good cake which called for flour, butter, and cream to be mixed with currants, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger and then baked into a cake. I do love that following the recipe for an extraordinary good cake he gives a recipe to make a cake other ways. You'd think he would build up to the best extraordinary cake but he didn't. Whatever. Anyway the big difference between these fruit cakes and modern fruit cakes were the fact that they were yeasted. That is how they rose. They used ale barm or other types of yeast to rise the cake instead of baking powder, baking soda, other chemical leaveners that we use today. The issue there is that yeast is not as easy to use and they still tended to be a little bit more dense even than our fruit cake today, but that was fruit cake for the next 200 years, and that became the cake to make at Christmas time and at other special times of the year, and they actually became the wedding cake for the 18th and 19th century. I did an entire video on the history of wedding cakes or bride cakes and I talk about how the fruit cake was the standard wedding cake of the period especially after Queen Victoria made it popular. She had a fruit cake and then iced it with white royal icing and that is the wedding cake that really became standard for a long time especially in the royal family and that continues to today. Queen Elizabeth II. Fruit cake. The wedding of Charles and Diana. Fruit cake. Even at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, they had fruit cake. So if you didn't get an invite, don't worry. That's okay. And while it's still eaten at royal weddings, I feel like what kept fruit cake alive today is the holidays, Christmas time. In England, it was popular to eat as Twelfth Night Cake, which then became Christmas Cake, and it was famous for its longevity. Even as far back as 1817, Dr. William Kitchener wrote, a good twelfth cake, not baked too much and kept in a cool, dry place will retain its moisture and eat well if twelve months old. One example of these fruit cakes lasting a very long time comes from the early 20th century. In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott led the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic regions, and among his provisions was a Huntley and Palmer's fruit cake. Being dense and calorie laden, it made for a perfect ration to bring along on the expedition. Unfortunately, they seemed to have left it behind at base camp when they went to the actual South Pole, because on their return trip from the South Pole, they all starved to death and died from exposure. Over a hundred years later, in 2017, the fruit cake was found, and in relatively good condition. In fact, the cake itself was in better condition than the tin box that it was kept in, but as Kitchener had said, these cakes would keep well in a cool and dry place, and there ain't no place cooler and drier than Antarctica. Now it was around this same period that sending your fruit cake through the mail really took off, because in 1913, the U.S. Postal Service began parcel post, and it was an instant success, and among many other items, fruit cakes became one of the most popular things to ship. You bake a cake, you pop it in the mail, and your Christmas shopping is done, and then it got even easier shortly afterward, because then you didn't even need to bake the cake, you could buy it. Most sources agree it was the Collins Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas who first decided to start packaging their fruit cakes specifically for mail order. Fancy cakes in fancy tins filled the mail rooms of the U.S. Postal Service, and more companies got in on the action, like the Claxton Bakery in Claxton, Georgia, who calls itself the fruit cake capital of the world. Sales continued to boom throughout the 1950s, and these fruit cake producers thought that the success would never end, but they were all of them deceived. For another cake was made deep from the pages of Betty Crocker. In the fires of American ovens, housewives baked a new cake, the chiffon cake. The light and airy texture of the chiffon and the other sponge cakes that were being made at the time, especially those coming out of boxes from places like Duncan Hines, Pillsbury, and Betty Crocker, well that was becoming the new popular thing on the American palate, and so the dense but rich fruit cake it just seemed old-fashioned. Now whether or not it's better or worse that's a matter of opinion, but old-fashioned, well that is a matter of fact. Now this change in the American palate for different types of cakes didn't happen overnight. In fact during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon they brought a fruit cake with them. They were cut into cubes to minimize crumbs, and then vacuum packed and sealed very tightly. The thing is it doesn't seem that they actually ate them because you can still see those same Apollo 11 cakes in the Smithsonian today. What is cool is that the newspapers of the day printed the recipe for these fruit cakes. In fact in 1972 just as the last manned mission to the moon was about to happen one newspaper printed the recipe saying the Apollo 17 astronauts kept munching on their own special fruit cake during man's last planned mission to and from the moon. You might want to put it on your Christmas surprise menu. Now that was in 1972 and the fall of the fruit cake was definitely on the precipice. In the 1950s it was touted as a holiday must, but by the 1980s one survey put fruit cake as the least wanted gift by 75% of the people polled. Now if there is anyone that could be said to have really made fruit cake a punch line it was Johnny Carson. On one of his shows he told a joke that said there is only one fruit cake in the entire world and people keep passing it around. This became a running gag and every year he would make fun of fruit cakes doing things like dropping a fruit cake onto his desk and then having the desk crumble beneath its weight. Funny, yes. But at what cost? At the cost of the popularity of the fruit cake? Maybe not, because even today well over 2 million fruit cakes are sold every year in the US during the holidays. But I know that you will not be buying a fruit cake this year because instead you'll be baking your own using this recipe from the era of the American Civil War. So once the skewer comes out clean remove the cakes from the oven and while they're still brush a healthy amount of brandy or rum on top. This isn't something you must do but it is traditional and you can actually brush a bit more on every day or so until you eat the cake or at least for the first few weeks. Now after the cakes have cooled on a cooling rack they are technically ready to eat but fruit cake aficionados say that they should be seasoned for at least a month or even up to a year but I'm not waiting a year or even a month so I'm going to try it right now. And here we are. A Christmas fruit cake from the 1860s. Y'all I'm just so proud that the fruit and the flower thing worked. The fruit is perfectly throughout the loaf. Super proud of that. Thank you to everyone on the Panettone episode who commented on how to do this. Love learning new things. So it's a tight crumb as they say in the cake baking world. It's going to be pretty dense. I mean it's a pretty heavy cake. I mean it's pretty heavy. It's not like crazy heavy but it's heavy for a cake. So I'm just going to take a bite and we'll see how it is. It's super flavorful. I'll give it that. The fruit comes through. The spices really come through. I used a lot of spices because I wanted it to be a heavily spiced cake. The fruit is... I mean it kind of has the flavor of like a plum pudding, a Christmas pudding or something like that. It's the same flavor profile. It's just because it's baked it's a very, very different texture. It is kind of dry. I think if I put more brandy or whatever on it over the next few days it would moisten up. It's not like crumbly dry. It's more just... It's just so dense that it's not the texture of cake that I would typically eat today, and that's why it's no longer as popular as it used to be. We've just... It's just been usurped by a nicer texture cake at least in my opinion, but the flavor is really, really nice, and the thing is I think with a cup of coffee or a glass of brandy it would actually be really nice. I could eat a couple pieces. I think it grows on you already. Just the flavor lingers for a very long time. It's really nice. It is old-fashioned, but it's tasting history, so what did you expect? So there's one more story about specifically Civil War era fruitcake that I wanted to share with you, and it comes out of Macon, Georgia. Early in the war a young soldier from Macon named Abner T. Holt got sick and was cared for by Dr. Charles Couch in Virginia. That Christmas of 1861, the first Christmas of the war he received a fruitcake that Mrs. Couch had baked for him and sent to him, and he got another one the next year as well. Then in 1863 he was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and he convalesced for several months again at the home of Dr. Couch and his wife. After two months he was able to come home and every Christmas since then those good friends have sent him the box with a nice fruitcake in it as a Christmas remembrance. Every year back down in Macon the cake arrived around the holidays and it became such a thing and Macon I guess was such a small town that the Macon Telegraph, the local newspaper started printing headlines like his annual cake. Mr. A.T. Holt receives his 38th reminder of Virginia friends, and even after both men and Mrs. Couch had died the families continued to exchange fruitcakes all the way up through the 1920s. So just remember if you are planning on baking a fruitcake this year and giving it to someone it might be a six decade long commitment. So just keep that in mind and have a wonderful holiday and I'll see you next time on Tasting History.