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Feasting and fruitcake

by Neil E. Das

And I know that it's not a party if it happens every night,
Pretending there's glamour and candelabra
When you're drinking by candlelight.

So sings Ben Gibbard as his alter ego, the lead singer of The Postal Service. The song “This Place is a Prison” seems, as best as I can tell, to be about the vapidity of lives given over to perpetual partying. And, as odd as it may sound, this seems to me to be an excellent metaphor for our culture’s relationship to dessert. Indeed, for many, dessert does seem like a “party that happens every night,” if not several times a day. And, as with anything licit or illicit, over consumption will surely lead to boredom and apathy and the need to up the ante. And so, phrases such as “double fudge” and “decadently delicious” jostle against “supersize” and “upsize” in our crowded gastronomic lexicon as the latest superlatives to describe the lengths to which we go to give our palates new thrills.

“Wow, bummer of a beginning to an article about desserts, dude,” some of you might be thinking. Well, my intent is certainly not to dis dessert. If you come to know me for even a short while, you will soon discover that, to the contrary, I love me some dessert. I have favorite desserts: apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and any cobbler. My aunts make Thanksgiving a true highpoint on the calendar. I can become rapturous about desserts. I take pictures of dessert. I can discourse on the differing virtues of apple pie served with vanilla ice cream or with cheese. I am sometimes compelled to break social taboos and ask a host for coffee because, well, certain desserts are a bit incomplete without it. I recently had a conversation with a friend who is self-described “foodie” on the nature of compotes. In short, my dessert credentials, if not as yet impeccable, are clearly in order. And, yes, on the negative side of the ledger, sometimes I eat too much dessert, either in a single sitting or in a season of life. I can understand from the inside the allure to use sugar to attempt to soothe a troubled soul.

No, it is because I love desserts so much, because I want to appreciate them even more than I currently do, that I write this article. Dessert, indeed, is a party, like a mini rave which gets our taste buds jumping, like a night of gaiety and sparkling wit. And like parties and feasting, they are truly more special with rarity. This is one of those insights perhaps that is so simple that it could go unsaid, but also it is so simple that it gets easily forgotten. Moreover, this is not an insight which I came to through logic, nor, indeed, one which I would have embraced as a child, but it was in reflecting upon my childhood that it came to me.

I was born in Sialkot, Pakistan. I did not grow up poor. My father was the president of a college. As was the custom of the land, we had a cook and gardeners and other help. We had three healthy meals a day and, as was also the custom of the land, multiple cups of tea throughout the day, with perhaps a cookie, or “biscuit” as they were called there, in the afternoons. And yet Pakistan was, and still is, a third world country and pre-packaged food was not in abundance and was expensive. For example, it was rare that our family had soft drinks. We got to have them really only on long train trips or on a visit to the large city of Lahore to see my aunt’s family, where, if we were lucky, we might also catch the latest James Bond flick. Roger Moore rules! And we also got 7-ups if we were sick. I remember telling my mother of the running tally I was keeping of just how many 7-ups my brother Adrian had gotten to drink during one particular illness.

In interesting contrast, when we came to Illinois on our furloughs, while socio-economically we descended from the upper class to the lower middle class and my mother found the need to economize, at the same time we could drink more soft drinks (or “sodas” as we call them in this part of the Midwest), eat more sweets, and eat more chicken, which was the most expensive meat in Pakistan at the time but which was the cheapest meat we could buy in America.

Now, let’s be clear, I did not appreciate this incongruous disparity as a child. No, at the boarding school for the children of missionaries which I attended in Pakistan, on Saturday nights we would either watch a movie or a television program that had been taped in America. And to us kids the commercials for Big Macs or Pizza Hut or Apple Jacks were every bit as enticing as anything the program itself might offer. As a kid, I would have thought you were crazy if you would have told me that one day I would appreciate growing up with less television, fewer snacks, less dessert, and that, indeed, one day I would actually ponder how, if I ever had kids, I might somehow program a sort of artificial scarcity into their lives to let them experience the same benefits and blessings I received from not getting anything anytime I wanted it. Indeed, I might have put my hands on my hips, stuck out my lower lip, and said to you, “Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”

In boarding school, our snacking and dessert schedule was actually quite full and regular. We got something sweet or salty with our afternoon tea. We got some manner of dessert with dinner. And, at least in elementary school, just before we went to bed there was the ceremonial unlocking of the “Feastings Cupboard” by our houseparent from which we were allowed get one or two “feastings” to munch as we sat around in our pajamas and listened to our devotions. As an aside, the Feastings Cupboard was also one of my first introductions to the inequities of geopolitics and food distribution. The European missionary kids had all nice chocolates and sweets. The kids whose parents worked in the Middle East or were in the diplomatic corps had suitcases full of goodies. And then some of us had mothers who lovingly baked dozens of cookies and made bags of savory, fried vermicelli and bundled them off with us on early morning trains, only to return home to suddenly silent households. What I would not give for some of that vermicelli now. Often, though, returning from a trip to America, my mother, too, would bring some snazzy American snacks. On one such occasion in elementary school, the loot contained a bag of Doritos. I can never now simply even smell original Doritos without thinking of that bag nibbled slowly, chip by chip, over the course of some weeks; I can never not think of my mother.

In the culture at large in Pakistan, though, even in our relatively privileged missionary circles, dessert did not happen every meal. Usually, the dessert slot of the meal consisted of seasonal fresh fruit, either mangoes, the fruit of heaven, in the summer months or a small cache from the treasure horde of oranges we bought in the winter, or, for a very short window in the autumn, apples from the mountains. And, oh the smell these elicited when the vendors pried open the flimsy wooden crates they came in and pushed back the straw.

Even “biscuits” were not an absolute given with every teatime at your own home, though if you went to someone else’s home, at any time of the day or night, in accordance with the wonderful traditions of Pakistani hospitality, you were always brought tea and something sweet or savory. Unless, of course, it was close to a meal time, which then you would courteously, yet persistently, be enjoined to share. But on Sundays, glorious Sundays, after church, our family would go to tea at the Scottish missionary ladies’ house, or the Dog House, as it was called for the collection of stray, and sometimes rather mangy, dogs they would take in. And there would be all manner of sweets: biscuits and tea cakes with raisins and tiny tarts filled with jelly or figs and Pakistani sweetmeats and, on occasion, the quintessential Scottish cookie, shortbread. It was also at the Dog House where I acquired what always seems to be amusing to my friends, my love of all things Scottish: comic books, dialect, and, from New Year's Eve celebrations also held there, Scottish dancing and Haggis. And it was at the Dog House that I would often hear from my mother the admonition I am still trying to apply to my life, “Okay, Neil, now that is your last cookie.”

Formal dinners, though, always meant dessert, whether in the elaborate context of a Pakistani wedding feast where savory curries and rice were rounded off with sweet rice, colored saffron yellow, burgeoning with raisins and almonds and coconut slivers, or in the western dinners which my mother would plan for visiting missionaries or college guests, where steak and potatoes and peas and carrots and cauliflower with white sauce and rolls would be followed by apple pie with cheese and coffee, which was all the more glorious because we had to wait to be old enough to drink it. And on real feast days, we would get all manner of strange but generally delicious desserts: jiggling trifles or the steaming plum pudding with little trinkets in wax paper hidden in it smothered in custard we would eat at the New Year or the cakes and cakes and cakes, which my father’s college employees would bring to the house during the Christmas season. We boys, as soon as it was polite, would check to see if the icing was butter cream or the much preferred straight up sugar frosting. If we were really lucky, one might be in the manner of an English wedding cake and be a deep, dark fruitcake with sweet, marzipan-style icing. And then we would have cakes all Christmas season, which we would principally save for Christmas parties but occasionally have for dessert.

And these feast days of Christmas—we did not call them that at the time but they certainly felt like days of special feasting—were also the part of the season of the fruitcake. Ah, fruitcake, the word which I am made to feel I should almost snicker at as I utter it. Ah fruitcake, the butt of hundred Christmas jokes, practical or otherwise, the symbol for nuttiness and difference, mental or identity related. There was a time when I was young and insecure when such opinions might affect me, but it has been a long time since I have realized that loving fruitcake is none of those things. Rather, it is a mark of distinction. It makes you a member of a club with very few members, yes, but with members who, when they do find one another, share great joy.

I can very clearly understand why people do not like fruitcake. It has all sorts of ingredients in it which even on their own might thwart a potential fruitcake club member, which may prove even more offensive as they are aggregated. And if speaking of aggregates sounds more like making a highway than making a cake, well you are not far off, as making fruitcakes is a major endeavor, both because they have so many ingredients and because, well, they are kind of difficult and expensive to make, and you rather want to do it all at once in one mammoth baking session for the whole season.

With fruitcake, not only is the product good but the process can be enjoyable, bonding people together like so much candied fruit. One of my Pakistani uncles, Uncle Peter, was never happier than when at Christmas time he would lead his family in mixing the fruitcakes at home and then taking them to be baked in the community baker’s ovens. When our family takes the time to make fruitcakes here, usually at the nudging of my father, despite the hard work, it is rewarding, particularly if we do it together, as we cream the shortening and eggs and sugar, add the fruit and flour, decorate the cooled cakes with red and green candied cherries and walnuts in simple patterns, then wrap them up with sliced apples in cheese cloth soaked in brandy and seal them in Tupperware. And the final product is made all the more tantalizing because you must wait at least a week to taste your first piece. And then, after a season of deciding whether to get out the fruitcake after a nice dinner or refraining for another day, after getting out the glorious ringed one  on Christmas day and eating several pieces each, the best piece of fruitcake does not actually come until February or March usually, when you slice the last cake that you have intentionally kept aside, long past the Christmas season, the one in which all the flavors have completely melded together and the brandy flavor has reached to the core. There is nothing quite like that long awaited, little piece of dessert.

One of my American uncles, Virgil, tells us the story of when they sent another uncle, Lowell, who was fighting in the South Pacific a ringed fruitcake, and my grandfather almost as an afterthought placed an apple on the hole at the center. They were Baptists in the 1940s so perhaps brandy was not really an option. By the time the fruitcake arrived half way around the world, the entire apple had almost disappeared and its flavor had permeated throughout the cake. My uncle, who shared the cake with his friends, said it was the best fruitcake he had ever eaten. Despite the serendipity of the apple infused fruitcake, though, I cannot help but believe the main joy came because the treat would surely have been completely unlooked for, because it had come as a token of love, like good news from a far off land.

Though it once bothered me that most people do not like fruitcake, I have long since learned not to “throw my pearls before swine,” either by gifting people with something they will not like or really even by talking openly about my secret love. No, seriously, I am not all that haughty about it, and if you already are or become a co-lover of fruitcake, I will be happy to share. Really, the point is that no matter what desserts we may enjoy, quirky or common, the sweetness of dessert can surely be a metaphor for a thousand gifts God gives us on earth and beyond. And, whether dessert or blessing, each is decidedly sweeter when partaken in relatively rarity, when awaited with delightful anticipation, received with thanks and joy, and shared with loved ones.

And, finally, a poem which I wrote for my cousins in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, loved ones with whom I shared numerous merry nights.

Winter Nights

There's Christmas plays on crisp, cold nights
In halls aglow with candle light.
Or paying well-loved friends a call.
Perhaps a trip to Sadar mall*.
Then home we go through darkened streets.
For, after all, home is most sweet.
And then comes the expected plea,
"Dear sister, will you make some tea?"
We'll get the cake and Christmas treats
And light the fire to warm our feet,
And pull our chairs and gather in
And then the real fun begins.
We'll sit and talk and laugh and joke
And some of us will blow our smoke.
And when we're running short of drink,
"Dear brother, it’s your turn, I think."
And then we'll talk and joke some more
Till weary eyes get red and sore.
Then cross the chilly courtyard stones
To thick rizais** to warm our bones.
And in the darkness left behind,
The peanut hulls and orange rinds
Fill dirty cups and bring to mind,
"Praise God above for joy-filled times."

*Local shopping district. Think bazaar, not Mallrats.
**Thick Pakistani quilt.