The year was 1525 and the people would soon be celebrating Christmas. Tradition required that a present be given out that was made at home. Now Martha Middleton was not the best in the kitchen, but she was determined this year to give it a go with something no one had ever made! What could she do with the dried fruit that she had stored from the summer bounty? She was going to try her hand baking a cake with her fruit!
Off to the kitchen she went. She donned her apron and took out the sacks of flour and sugar. Next she went out to the hen house and gently reaching beneath her birds, she wrapped her fingers around the warm eggs. She headed back into the kitchen and passing through the main room, she spied the bowl of walnuts and stopped to take some of them too.
Gathering up some of the dried summer fruit she decided to make them sweeter. So, she put water in a bowl and added a lot of sugar and left the fruit to soak. She then went about her chores for the morning letting the fruit soak up the sweetened mixture.
A couple of hours had passed when Martha returned to the kitchen. Much to her surprise her sugar soaking had worked with the fruit! She only had a slight bit of the sugar water to pour off and took the fruit and chopped it up into bits. Then, cracking the nuts, she chopped these too and added them to the bowl of fruit and mixed it up. She gathered and measured out the rest of the items and then mixed in her fruit. She poured this off into a pot, which she then covered, and stuck it into the pile of coals in the kitchen hearth to bake.
When it was done she carefully removed the pot from the fire and left it to cool. Once the cake had cooled she cut it into thick slices and set the pieces into a basket. She would be passing these out as they went to visit the neighborhood friends later that day.
The rest of the day passed quickly and Martha went off with her family to visit the neighbors and to wish them happy holidays. Well, the long and the short of it is this: Martha passed out the cake, and folks in those days were too polite, and being so, no one told her how bad her fruitcake was. Instead they all asked her for the recipe, which she proudly shared! Variations of her recipe still exist today and people of today are still too polite to say how awful this cake truly is!
Well, that was my version of how this cake came into being, but history does show that the cake originated in Ancient Roman times and that the cake was made with pomegranate, pine nuts and barley mash. It had a tremendous shelf life and it is also recorded that Roman soldiers often brought fruitcake with them to the battlefields. Hmmm…I wonder if they used it as ammunition?
Life in the Foothills 