D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
Season's Eatings
If you don't like fruitcake, you're just, well, nuts!
I have to confess a holiday heresy: I actually like fruitcake. Much maligned as rock-hard and tasteless, fruitcake has become the laughingstock of holiday treats. In urban myth and perhaps in fact, fruitcakes are passed from family to family, holiday to holiday, like some sort of cursed object out of H.P. Lovecraft: Who'll get stuck with the fruitcake this year? Indeed, some suspect that the world contains only one fruitcake, uneaten and even un-nibbled-on, shuffled from victim to victim to create the illusion of multiple fruitcakes.
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A Norwegian krumkake iron. |
Now, no one except possibly your dentist likes a fruitcake that's so dried out it breaks your teeth. Antique, hand-me-down fruitcakes wrapped in newspaper with headlines such as "Hindenburg Crashes in Fiery Blaze" or "William Jennings Bryan Accepts Nomination" probably should be discarded if you can find a landfill that'll take them. If you can't tell what sort of "fruit" those baked-in rocks used to be, it's safest not to tempt fate.
But a fruitcake baked within living memory and properly moistened with brandy or some other spirits can be a yummy holiday treat. What's not to like? Dried and candied fruit, nuts (OK, I can live without the Brazil nuts that makers of "mixed nuts" prefer for padding out their assortments — Brazil can keep 'em), some sort of cake in-between. . . And did I mention the booze? How many other baked goods get doused in liquor? After two slices of fruitcake, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to drive in New Mexico. (I can see the TV ads now: Gov. Richardson stares grimly into the camera and warns, "You eat fruitcake, you drive, you lose!") If fruitcake ever makes a comeback, I expect certain New Mexico drivers to stock up with a "six-tin" of the holiday treat instead of a six-pack before a December road trip.
In fact, I've actually made fruitcake — perhaps the only person in America who can make that claim who's not an 85-year-old grandma. Years ago, one of the zillions of cooking magazines I subscribe to had a whole feature on fruitcake recipes. As I recall, we baked up two: a traditional, red-and-green candied fruit creation plus a variation packed with golden raisins.
As testimony to the edible success of that endeavor, neither fruitcake can be found, in whole or part, anywhere within our house today, perhaps 20 years later. Nor do said fruitcakes burden the households of any of our immediate family, friends or strangers we encountered on buses who unwisely left their briefcases or backpacks open.
It's worth adding, in the further defense of the holiday fruitcake, that the phrase "nutty as a fruitcake" represents yet another slur on this treasured holiday confection. Properly made, a fruitcake should not overwhelm the eater with nuts (especially not those damn Brazil nuts). Rather, the sensation should first be a chewy, cake-y fruitiness, followed only thereafter by a nutty crunchiness. And then of course the liquor.
True, given the sad state of fruitcake-making in America, the phrase "hard as a fruitcake" could perhaps substitute for "hard as nails" among those seeking fresher similes. But you'd have to be, well, nuts to keep repeating that tired old "nutty" cliche.
Having confessed one holiday-food heresy, as a transplant to New Mexico I must fess up to another: I'm not all that wild about tamales. I know that tamales are a cherished part of the Land of Enchantment's culinary heritage, and that making tamales is a traditional holiday chore. But tamales will not be on our Christmas table this year.
It's not that I don't lap up other "red or green?" fare, all year round. Give me enchiladas any time, or a combination plate. Tostadas, burritos, bring it on. (I do, however, draw the line at menudo.)
But tamales? Not so much.
I've even tried my hand at making tamales, too, although perhaps it doesn't count without the tutelage of an octogenarian abuela (who, in another state, would be spending December cranking out fruitcakes instead). Tamales require a lot of work, which is probably part of their traditional holiday appeal — much like other holiday pains-in-the-neck, such as putting up the Christmas lights. Such shared ordeals bind families together and give them something to bicker about besides whether Aunt Rita's second husband is a ne'er-do-well and which sibling should inherit the blanket chest.
My homemade tamales turned out OK, I guess, pretty much like the ones I've occasionally ordered in restaurants. But I can't see what all the excitement is about: Tamales, after all, are essentially steamed corn meal with some sort of flavoring. Then again, I've never been big on polenta, either, and can't understand the Southern obsession with grits, which have a near-supernatural ability to suck up and smother any flavoring added to them.
My wife likes tamales even less than I, further reducing my incentive to go through all that trouble. After hours of mixing, battling with cornhusk wrappers, and steaming without the filling falling out, my reward is that look of "I'll be a good sport and choke these down." Not exactly the motivation an abuela wannabe is looking for. Enchiladas, anybody?
Growing up in the Upper Midwest, I've long been familiar with a trio of other traditional holiday foods — traditional for Scandinavia, that is. In ascending order of edibility, these are lutefisk, lefse and krumkake.
You've probably heard of lutefisk, in much the same way you've heard tales of — but, wisely, never sampled — haggis or blood sausage or head cheese. Like those foods (and here I use the term "food" loosely), it's hard to imagine the sequence of events that led to the development of lutefisk:
"Hey, Sven, I have some leftover dried whitefish here. Vat should I do with it?"
"Yumpin' yiminy, Ole, why not treat it with lye?"
"Vat a yim-dandy idea ya got der, Sven! Ve'll call it 'lutefisk,' for 'lye fish.'"
"Vat a yummy-sounding name dat vill be! People vill be beatin' a path to our door, yust in time for Christmas!"
Were the long-ago Scandinavian inventors of lutefisk insane? Loopy from drinking too much mead? Hungover from their last Viking raid? Charitably, I like to think they were simply playing an elaborate trick on future generations: Surely, no one would eat this! But they do — all year, in fact, though I associate lutefisk with the holidays' celebration of heritage.
In the flesh, so to speak, lutefisk looks every bit as horrendous as you'd expect: pale, gelatinous, slimy. And words can't begin to describe the smell. As for the taste, lutefisk is on the list right after menudo as a delicacy I'll get around to sampling — someday.
Lefse, on the other hand, is mercifully innocuous — sort of the Norwegian version of a tortilla, but typically made from potatoes rather than corn. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, one Minnesota tortilla factory makes a monthly run of lefse using its tortilla equipment. Though lefse can also be consumed year-round, most Scandinavians associate it with the holidays. It's eaten simply buttered or sprinkled with sugar and rolled up like an enchilada.
If lefse ranks sort of take-it-or-leave-it on the holiday treats scale, krumkake ("krum-kaka") is a definite "take." Think of krumkake as an especially thin and crispy waffle cone without the ice cream — though it's good with ice cream or whipped cream inside, too — rolled instead in a perfect cylinder. My wife makes a couple of batches of krumkake every holiday season, using her Norwegian grandmother's recipe and her mother's krumkake iron. The kitchen fills with an aroma like that of baked sugar cookies as she griddles each dollop of dough to a golden brown, then wraps the flat, still-warm krumkake around a one-inch wooden dowel to give the treat its distinctive shape.
Since moving to New Mexico, we've sometimes given krumkake as holiday goodies to friends, where someone else might give cookies. At first, the recipients are a bit baffled. My wife instructs them: Gobbled from either open end, a crispy krumkake tends simply to explode into a zillion crumbs. The best strategy is to nibble from the tail end of the rolling process, like eating a roll of paper towels.
Soon these friends master the art of krumkake eating — and want more.
So perhaps some lucky few of you out there will be getting krumkake for Christmas this year. Probably not fruitcake, though, since such a gift would be looked on askance, and certainly not tamales — at least not from our kitchen.
Or maybe this is the year to whip up a big batch of lutefisk — as long as we give it all away.
Desert Exposure editor David A. Fryxell is trying to
watch what he eats over the holidays.