Damon Lee Fowler

For more than twenty years, beginning in the early days of researching my first cookbook when the handsome antique recipes first captured my cook's imagination, fruitcake making was one of my favorite holiday chores.

There was something soothingly nostalgic about it, even though it wasn't part of my childhood. My mother was a fine baker and had made the family fruitcakes in her youth, but she stopped making them when she married a minister and became a working mother with three rowdy boys.

And yet, candying my own citrus peel, picking over the pecans, hydrating the dried fruit and steeping it in whiskey, mixing the spice-and-sherry-laced pound cake batter, was always like a refreshing visit back to childhood. And the aroma after it went into the oven was worth every minute of the trouble it had taken to get it there.

Then, rather abruptly, I stopped—and not because I got tired of it. Read More 

It may be hard for the jaded comedians of our day to believe, but there actually was a time when fruitcake was well-loved, and got all the respect it really deserved.

Rich with rare and expensive dried and glacéed fruits and nuts, heady with brandy, sherry, and rare spices, it was, until well into the nineteenth century, the ultimate celebration cake for virtually every occasion, even (and especially) weddings, where its fruit-packed crumb symbolized the hope that the marriage itself would be fruitful.

It was, however, at Christmastide that fruitcakes were prized the most. That was partly because their richness befit the exuberance of the season, and partly because they not only kept well, making them the perfect treat to have on hand for drop-in company, but actually got better with age: by Twelfth Night a properly aged fruitcake was even more moist, aromatic, and delicious than it had been on Christmas Day. Read More