For Many Christmas Means Fruit Cake
Removing fruit cakes from tins, 1939, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Making Christmas fruitcake was a long process, according to the 84 old Benjamin Outlaw. When asked what Christmas was like growing up in Windsor, North Carolina, Outlaw responded, “Oh boy, it was like heaven.” Mother “would start cooking her fruitcake, sometime about a month before Christmas. And she always made [either apple or grape] wine.” Hattie Outlaw poured the “wine on the cake until Christmas . . . building it up.” This must have worked to season the cake, “because it was the best fruitcake I have ever eaten.”
Food Historian Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie
