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to reconstruct the gist of the recipe with her but like the travellers on the meadow nana was uninterested in passing along her knowledge she denied that she had any knowledge there was no recipe to be passed down just a reminder made in a thin voice over a crackling international phone call straddling time zones to use brown sugar when nana made the cakes she made them a month in advance of christmas and we drove up to get ours we always seemed to make the drive at night sunk deep into the back seat of the car i stared up and out of the window to catch the first sight of the illuminated city promising myself that one day i would live in a high rise and also be a bright window of light in a night sky once at nana s my brother and i were layered into bunk beds leaning out a little i could twitch the nylon lace curtain aside and watch the traffic go by double decker buses satisfied me best the towerblocks we d driven past glowed with intimations of varied and sovereign lives now those lives roared past my brother and me the buses glowing their two decks packed with many faces alive with possibility later next day we got ready to leave and make the drive back down in dreary daylight i was told to retrieve a cake from where they were stashed under the sideboard each one housed in a dented biscuit tin the kind that had once held christmas biscuit assortments i pried open the lids to find the ones with cake there was always one full of old keys our cake came with us down south we packed it into the car and waved our goodbyes but that cake was headed south in more ways than one it was bound for doom and damnation in the form of drink my grandparents household was strictly teetotal i was always told that poppa s years of war service on the submarines had shown him the evils of the bottle and no one was allowed to bring drink into his house herein lay a problem a fruitcake is the most immortal of cakes as weighty and mindful as a cheese but its longevity must be procured through intoxicants sherry or rum brandy or whisky a fruitcake needs its tipple so the removal of the cake from nana s to our kitchen was a smuggler s run and poppa who observed the handover in silence must have known it home again i watched as the cake was unwrapped from its double jacket of greaseproof paper and foil revealing its pocked seductive surface the common practice at this stage of things is to stab the top of the cake with a skewer or maybe a knitting needle and then drizzle your liquor of choice over the holes allowing it to sink in feeding the cake once a week or so renders it succulent and vivacious come christmas my mother however felt that this was doing things half mast although there was many a knitting needle in our house including a strange set of metal ones sharpened to a renovated point by my teetotaler grandfather my mother eschewed craft for science she had a nurse friend who wore starched white and navy uniforms cinched with an affecting belt this friend crept on regulation soles down a gleaming squeaky corridor to a stock cupboard and acquired my mother a large hypodermic needle each week we undressed the cake and my mother drew a length of amber coloured sherry into the syringe then repeatedly pierced and incrementally released the liquid into the body of the cake a drop welling up at the site of each puncture i watched entranced injections are particularly pertinent to the young because they are such a definite encounter with state sanctioned pain they work in a phantasmal future protecting you from diseases that others got before you but from which your generation will be saved if you just and you must surrender to the needle and the fruitcake yielded too or perhaps it yielded on my behalf accepting the slow slide of the long needle without sting without complaint my family recipe then is for a brown sugar cake that betrays temperance and accuracies of inventory and that gains its long life as many of us do with a little help from the medical profession my first task clearly was to get hold of a large bottle of brandy my second was to procure a hypodermic needle and my third was to find a recipe with actual measurable ingredients the brandy and the recipe were easy a well stocked drinks cabinet provided one and nigel slater stood gamely in for grandma providing the other the second of my tasks stumped me for a while i solicited a medical friend a doctor he cheerily agreed but it turns out that doctors aren t allowed in stockrooms and after two abortive attempts to duck into one he said my chances were slim nevertheless a few days later he was successful a nurse sympathetic to the cause had been enlisted i was now the owner of a sizeable syringe and a selection of sterile packed needles we re not trained what gauge to use for fruitcake he explained furnished with contraband i was ready to summon ingredients a fruitcake must possess the gallantry of crumb not be simply frenzied with fruit and the fruits themselves they should not be painted into living dead charades of summer colour they must be dark they must not deny that they are aged they must carry with them the signs of their survival it seems to me that a fruitcake is indeed an audacious creature but its audacity is a consequence of sly hoardings dubious exchanges and shameless incongruities a fruitcake is a brazen and aging hussy tossing its head at strictures of season and locale demanding indulgence flaunting acquisition it is an american southerner who tells it best truman capote who knew something about fruitcake delivers a tale of the making of christmas cakes that pairs an abandoned child and a simple elderly cousin raking ingredients out of the leaves of poverty and disavowal the cakes are soaked in moonshine bundled into a baby carriage and mailed to a president a fruitcake mixes fruits of the vine with those of the tree and the bush all stolen from their own time delayed into another these fruits are picked at their peak of ripeness only to be dried wizened for futurity then revived again swelled by alcohol itself aged and stored and fermented a fruitcake violates generation and seasons and then revels in its own untimeliness prepared in advance preserved and often eaten long after the festival it marks an aunt of mine was once at a wake where fruitcake was served a nippy plate circulator observed my aunt s pleasure as she took the first bite and commented good cake isn t it corpse baked it herself cake thou art and unto cake shalt thou return fruitcake is dyed with tannins and it ingests its own avarice starting to recall the blackest earliest kinds of wealth returning the cake to the sod that grew it i therefore filled mine with the darker fruits figs and prunes fruits that saturate and irritate and with the woodier less prancing nuts hazelnuts and walnuts and my sugar was the most treacle brown i could find i injected the cake over several weeks and then i pressed the heavy blade of my largest knife to its firm crust and cut it like peat its wet half ancient geology finally exposed syllabus fruitcake slightly adapted from nigel slater this is a large cake enough to feed 16 350g unsalted butter 175g light muscovado sugar 175g dark muscovado sugar 1kg total weight of dried fruits prunes figs candied peel and dried rather than glace cherries if you can find them i used an equal mix of bing and ranier dried cherries delicious 5 large free range eggs 100g ground almonds 150g shelled hazelnuts 500g total weight vine fruits raisins sultanas currants 5 tbsps brandy zest of 1 lemon zest and juice of 1 orange 1 2 tsp baking powder 350g plain flour you will also need a 24 25cm cake tin with a removable base fully lined with a double layer of lightly buttered greaseproof paper or nonstick baking paper which should come at least 5cm above the top of the tin if you skip this bit the edges of the cake will burn set the oven to 160 c gas mark 3 cream the butter and sugar till light and fluffy scrape down the sides of the bowl from time to time with a spatula while the butter and sugars are beating to a light and fluffy texture cut the dried fruits into small pieces removing the hard stalks from the figs add the eggs to the mixture one at a time it will curdle but don t worry then slowly mix in the ground almonds hazelnuts all the dried fruit the brandy the citrus zest and juice now mix the baking powder and flour together and fold them lightly into the mix scrape the mixture into the prepared tin smoothing the top gently and put it in the oven leave it for an hour then without opening the oven door turn down the heat to 150 c gas mark 2 and continue cooking for 2 hours check to see whether the cake is done by inserting a skewer into the centre it should come out with just a few crumbs attached but no trace of raw cake mixture take the cake out of the oven and leave it to cool before removing it from the tin posted by syllabub at 1 41 am 19 comments wednesday november 07 2007 bitter orange weddings pallid repetitious happen beneath the orange blossom but bitter births the ballads tell us happen beneath the thorn bitter births no two the same stubborn shovings into the world the sharp bright reminders of forced or lost or hopeless love we have a tree in our small bricked garden a tree of just such beginnings out of place wrong transplanted it spites the odds withstanding the wrong climate with a sort of belligerence it is a gnomish orange tree and it has blossom thorn and fruit the trunk is tripartite it grows into and out of itself again three separate trunks fused ominously together and the leaves are three part too poncirus trifoliata a three leaved citrus the ghostly and scentless blossoms drift across the tree not once but twice a year mistakenly a way of coping with alien seasons they come first in early spring against the black mesh of thorny branches then again in late spring against a bright and poison green the thorns are two inches long and dagger sharp and the fruit that comes sometimes later sometimes intermingled with its flower is hard round sure and vehemently orange but for all their hardness the oranges are covered in a light down pubescent say the botanists and it s true that they crowd the tree with a kind of adolescent feeling social often mottled precipitate the rush to fruit clutters the tree with eager masses and desperate outliers and when they fall they rain down hard careless of where they roll most trees grow around us without benefit of narrative but the strangeness of this tree has preserved the story of its origin we bought our moody slice of house from a young french teacher named michael who had lived in the house for three years before he fell in love with a montreal patriot who refused to come south and demanded that michael emigrate with a certain urgency michael told us about the woman from whom he had bought miss polly who had been born in the house and lived there 90 years until she upped sticks to move in with the daughter in law widowed by her son there were three things of miss polly s that he was leaving with us michael said the first two he had found in the attic crawlspace a splintering frame containing a porous elderly print of st anthony the saint of lost things and lost causes and another frame holding miss polly s 1943 beauty school certificate this diploma attests to miss polly s training in scalp and hair treatment and beauty culture mary pressley norman it declares in cursive is a competent operator in marcel waving water waving finger waving round curling hair dressing hand moulding electrical appliances sanitation and sterilization anatomy and skin bleaching miss polly michael told us didn t care about the two framed guarantees we could do with them as we wished but the third thing the third thing we must protect the third thing was the tree no one she asked should ever take an axe to her orange tree from years of discipline of marcel and water waving of hand moulding and skin bleaching she had saved money for a trip to jamaica when she returned she smuggled back in her hand luggage three small green thorny sproutings from her paradise somehow they reached toward the distant cold philadelphia sun melded and survived old houses bear the marks of their travails our house is made of little rooms and passages that break the simple rectangle up into interlocking spaces scarred from old leaks the cracked paint of previous lives heaving beneath the clean new coats dark textured by old paper plaster dented woodwork bead and board and porcelain our house has a whiff of the sinister we hung miss polly s certificate in the living room its papery gold foil seal glinting in the dim light in the dining room st anthony clutches his heavy lilies and bends over the child jesus their gloomy glimmering halos blend together and in the garden the tree lifts its crown of thorns bright with oranges we have now lived alongside this tree for three years two octobers came and went twice the oranges hurled themselves like suicidal teenage lovers from their thorny branches twice i swept them in their hundreds under the garden door where they were squashed by passing garbage trucks or were batted down the alleyway by that year s generation of lean and hungry feral kittens like the kittens i am a scavenger i fill my pockets with unidentifiable nuts found on walks and have been known to steal the decorative kale out from under party platters smuggle it home and feast upon it steamed sautéed and stewed but for two years these oranges in all their abundance failed to tempt me i d found some hints here and there that you could make marmalade out of them but you can make marmalade out of old boots if you smother them in sugar and boil til dead dry and hard miss polly s oranges were the bright emblem of her dedication to the sinewy goals of survival and beauty there was none of the yielding effulgence the lazy juicy fulsomeness necessary for culinary pleasure but this year we enjoyed a long summer the warm days stretched on and on we went away for a month and unobserved the tree let down its guard the oranges swelled beyond their usual clench they ripened smooth and bright and taut with juice when i stepped on one it tore and its spill of seed and sap released a fresh floral scent reminiscent of passion fruit the tree was still in charge in this year of lusciousness it was commanding me to cook its crop it is the pucker of marmalade of which i am fond there s no point in marmalade slumped into sweetness marmalade is a sophisticated vice half kiss half bite it grips the palate and pleases through severity which is why of course the english like it it preserves the scold of the school dormitory on the breakfast plate of the civil servant it encodes our sourness our love of critique our brutality into a jar of brilliant orange a friend of mine a fellow émigré wears mostly marmalade orange her hair too and i love her for it she has plucked the english thorn ...
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