 |
ARTLOOK #7 | December / January 2004/2005
Column: Food & Wine
Stuffed and soaked
Half hidden near the back of my fridge is a Christmas cake. I cannot remember precisely when I put it there, but it last attracted attention about a year ago. I had been contemplating our resources before the festive season (the one that is now a distant memory, not the one upon us) and wondering if the two cakes I had just made would be enough for the many friends who would drop in for a seasonable glass of sweet sherry. I remember wondering if this one had suffered much from being there. It seemed unlikely that any great harm should have come to it, since my method of interment of fruit cakes, for which I have no immediate goal, is to embalm them in malt whisky, seal them up in cling wrap and plastic, and lay them down in a cool dark place. But frost-free refrigerators are notoriously drying, and this particular cake was never intended to be anything other than deliciously moist. So I exhumed the thing and examined it carefully for signs of wear and tear, drought and plague.
All seemed well, so I gave it another turn in the furnace, topped it up with embalming fluid and put it back until the said friends should come and look expectant. In the event, none of them did drop in for a glass of seasonable sherry. Their ambitions all lay in the general direction of champagne or chardonnay or, in a few reprehensible cases, the unseasonable embalming fluid. The latter would have made a perfect accompaniment for a confection, which was already, in a sense, an extension of the whisky bottle. But appetites for fruit cake were delicate last year: all claimed they had enough of their own to get through and couldn't undertake to dispose of more than a sliver of mine. My obliging consort and I were left to do the work ourselves. We did a creditable job of the first two, but by the end of the season felt too well stuffed to clear any backlog stored in the fridge.
To a casual observer this willingness of friends to do their duty by the one (the bottle), but not the other (the cake), might have seemed a cruel snub to my tastes in Christmas cake. With the right wine-perhaps one of the younger, less sweet oloroso sherries-I can be very content with something light, dry and slightly short in texture-and have an excellent recipe for producing it. However, my all-time favourite is heavy, moist and fudge-like: the kind of cake that would probably not win a CWA baking competition. Over the years I have experimented with many different mixing and cooking techniques to get exactly this texture. One year a now-former friend went so far as to remark that she could see little difference between my cake and my pudding. She had always thought the difference should be that one was baked and the other steamed, whereas I, in pursuit of soddenness, had that year steamed both. I thought this observation unfair and unnecessarily personal, and told her so. It should have been perfectly clear to her that one had been preserved in whisky, the other in rum.
There is a good reason why one's choice of fruitcake no longer needs to bend towards the sherry that is to accompany it. Thanks to a short-sighted piece of tax legislation in the 1970s, Australia has bred a whole generation of Christmas revellers who know nothing of the pleasures of that drink-although their great aunts may still be remembered for taking rather too much pleasure of it, especially the variety known as 'best cooking'. One can still find a swag of Christmas cake recipes that call for sherry in amounts ranging from a couple of tablespoons to half a bottle. I can't imagine what people use; perhaps the bottle shops keep a small shelf for 'cake sherry' somewhere between the Kahlúa and Baileys Irish Cream. I never look there.
Much of the sherry Australia produced in the seventies, though satisfactory for aunts, was capable of making little improvement to a Christmas cake. Early in my career I learned never to accept the offer of a pre-prandial glass of sherry unless I could see the bottle and read the label. In those days lead crystal decanters were still in vogue and one had to assume they were topped up from a flagon kept hidden in the pantry.
During this decade there was also some seriously good fortified wine produced and sold at quite reasonable prices. Most of the particulars of this wine have long since drifted beyond the pale of memory, but a single bottle in the Amontillado style reminds me of Seppelt's celebrated DP range of fortified whites, some of which became legends at wine shows. My remaining bottle has been lying around in the cellar for years, wanting only an occasion and a quorum of appreciative friends. The chance of either seems to be fading. An even more precious memento is a small dump bottle of 'Oloroso' bottled in the 1980s (I think) in honour of Alan Bailey, founder of my favourite Rutherglen vineyard. I opened its twin more than a dozen years ago and found in it rich and complex syrup the like of which I had never seen before, nor ever have since.
As good as the limited release and show wines were, serious winos were not always content with colonial sherry; they knew that the real stuff came from Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. To be able to talk with authority about Spanish sherries (and I don't mean Harvey's Bristol Cream) was a mark of distinction in a crowd already eager to distance itself from great Aunt Mabel's indiscretions. While the bottom was falling out of the Australian market, world demand for Spanish sherry continued to climb strongly until the end of the seventies.
Knowing a bit about real sherry was therefore still a social asset. It also provided a soft landing in the eighties, because when the masses of eastern Europe turned from sherry to trendier party drinks and the great houses of Jerez had to sell off surplus stocks, there were some excellent bargains left for those still willing. Those bargains helped to fix in my mind the belief that Christmas cake was first and foremost an excuse for drinking a good sherry.
If, as I expect, the spirits of Christmas past return to cheer the Christmas present, we will again reach the end of the festive season thoroughly stuffed and soaked, but still in possession of my favourite cake. Perhaps if I keep it a decade or three, attending to its yearly preservation, it will gradually acquire such a richness and complexity as will make it a fitting companion for the precious AVB Oloroso. Their eventual meeting should, if possible, be at my last Christmas feast-because after that there will be nowhere much to go.
Colin Bannerman is a freelance writer specialising in food history culture and communication.
