The Port Arthur News
November 15, 2007 05:13 pm
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By Darragh Doiron
If you don’t like fruitcake, maybe you haven’t had it done right.
Corsicana’s world-famous Collin Street Bakery’s tins, heavy with pecan-embellished richness offer it right.
They are a far cry from the shriveled, back-of-the-shelf packages of fruitcake filled with lurid, neon strips of rubbery dried fruit.
Still, the late talk show host Johnny Carson’s joke is still making the holiday rounds. He purported there was one fruitcake in the world and it just kept getting passed around each year. Aunt Maude re-wraps it for Cousin Walter and so on.
Some are heavy as a brick and suitable for doorstops, but a good, homemade fruitcake has reason to be heavy.
Old time cooks used to bake them weeks ahead of the holidays and bathe them in liquor several times before they were “ripe.” That fruit was probably fresh from the tree and just soaking up that rum or bourbon.
Jim Thomas of Port Neches remembers the fruitcakes his grandma made in Odessa.
“She put everything in there,” he said.
That also meant “a little liquor.” “But not much, because she was Baptist. She kept it in the back of her closet,” he joked.
The ritual baking is often a family affair. Ann Kleinpeter of Groves has total recall of a batch she made years ago.
“It was 1951 and I was expecting my second child,” she said. “I had purchased all the ingredients for fruitcakes. These were to be given away as gifts.”
Uncomfortable with the pregnancy, she tossed and turned the night before baking day.
“Sleep was not to be,” she said, so she got up and got to it.
“When my husband woke up, every available flat surface was covered with fruitcakes cooling. My gifts were ready,” she remembered.
Bridge City’s Patty Collins is on the other side of the fruitcake debate.
“I don’t like it. That’s what I have to say. No, no, no,” she reiterated.
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