It's the first of December and it's fruitcake weather, so I've been thinking this week about Truman Capote's famous short essay, A Christmas Memory, about baking fruitcakes as a child with his favorite relative.
"A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable - not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!"
I disagree. You can make a delicious fruitcake from real dried fruit. I use Alton Brown's recipe off Good Eats - the episode title is "It's a Wonderful Cake" and the recipe on foodnetwork.com is "Free-Range Fruitcake." Try it!
Thanks for introducing me to this Christmas cooking piece. I'd never heard of it before.
I *love* this story. A couple years ago This American Life broadcast a 1959 recording of Capote reading it - I can't find a way to link to it directly but it comes up if you search their site for Capote, or Episode 255:
http://www.thislife.org/
Go, listen!