THE FRUITCAKE DEFENSE LEAGUE
The President's Baking Calendar
October through Kings' Day, this year
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A fruitcake cannot be rushed, and so neither can the baker. Here is how I will go about it this year, in case you'd like to bake along. I bake two batches now, four loaves each, which is a long way down from two hundred, but there are only so many people one man can feed. The first batch is for Thanksgiving and for the cakes that have to travel. The second is for Christmas.
The feedings are on Sundays, after the ten o'clock Mass, because that is when I remember.
| October |
| The first week | Buy the fruit, the nuts, the brandy and a good supply of cheesecloth. The candied cherries go fast once the stores put out the holiday baking things, so don't wait. |
| Sat., Oct. 9 | Candy the orange and lemon peel for both batches. The whole house smells of oranges for two days. This is not a drawback. |
| Sun., Oct. 10 | Put the first batch of fruit to soak after Mass. |
| Mon., Oct. 11 | Bake the first batch. Columbus Day, so Eric has the day off and comes over to grease the pans and eat the ends of the peel. Four loaves. Wrap them in brandy cloth when cool. |
| Sun., Oct. 17 | First feeding of the first batch. Two or three tablespoons of brandy on the cloth of each. |
| Sat., Oct. 23 | Put the second batch of fruit to soak. |
| Sun., Oct. 24 | Bake the second batch, after Mass and the feeding of the first. A long day in a warm kitchen. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday in October. |
| Sun., Oct. 31 | Feed both batches. That evening, candy for the trick-or-treaters, like everybody else. I am not so devoted that I hand out fruitcake to children in costume. |
| November |
| Mon., Nov. 1 | All Saints' Day. In Portugal the children go door to door on this morning asking for bread and little cakes, and my mother kept the custom on our street in Fall River until the day she died. I bake a pan of small sweet rolls for the children next door in her memory. |
| Sun., Nov. 7 | Feed both batches. |
| Thu., Nov. 11 | Veterans Day. I served in the Navy from 1943 to 1945, on a destroyer escort in the Atlantic. A thin slice and a small glass for the shipmates. There are not many of us left to raise one. |
| Sun., Nov. 14 | Feed both batches. Wrap and mail the cakes going farthest: my niece in California, and a League member in the Azores who wrote me such a fine letter that I am sending her a loaf. |
| Sun., Nov. 21 | Feed both batches. |
| Thu., Nov. 25 | Thanksgiving. The first cake is cut, six weeks and three days old, at my daughter's table, after the pie. Somebody will tell the joke. I will smile. |
| Sun., Nov. 28 | First Sunday of Advent. Feed the second batch. |
| December |
| Wed., Dec. 1 | Mail everything else that has to go by mail. After the first week of December the line at the post office goes out the door. |
| Sun., Dec. 5 | Feed the second batch. |
| Wed., Dec. 8 | The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and the day Grace and I were married, in 1946. We had very nearly fifty years. I take a loaf to the cemetery and then to the rectory, because she would have. |
| Sun., Dec. 12 | Last feeding for the gift cakes. Deliver to the neighbors, the doctor, the girls at the bank and the monsignor, who once told me the joke and has been trying to make up for it since 1971. |
| Sun., Dec. 19 | Final feeding of the Christmas cake. Leave it alone now. |
| Fri., Dec. 24 | Consoada, the Christmas Eve supper: salt cod with boiled potatoes and cabbage, the way my mother made it. Then the sweets, the rabanadas and the sonhos, and the fruitcake, cut thin. Then Midnight Mass, which my father called the Rooster's Mass, as they do in Portugal. |
| Sat., Dec. 25 | Christmas. Feliz Natal. Sleep late. Eat cake. |
| Fri., Dec. 31 | The last night of the year, and of the nineteen-hundreds. Twelve raisins at midnight, one for each month, the Portuguese way, and a wish with each. My grandson tells me the computers may all stop at midnight. If they do, I will still have cake. |
| January |
| Thu., Jan. 6 | Dia de Reis, the Kings' Day. The king cake, the round one with the candied fruit like jewels on top, and a dried fava bean baked inside. Whoever finds the bean buys next year's cake. In forty-one years at the bakery I baked a great many beans, and I found exactly one myself. I bought the cake. |
If you bake along, write and tell me how it goes. If your cake comes out dry, tell me that too, and we will figure out what happened. It is usually the oven. It is sometimes the brandy, in that there was not enough.
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Last updated Monday, September 20, 1999
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