Fruit Cake—The Butt of all Jokes
26th April, 2006
by Moni Schilller
Who doesn’t love to laugh and jeer at the idea of fruitcake? There are so many aspects that are funny, I really can’t blame people for their insanely rude comments re: my business. The most typical: “Fruitcake?! Why would you want to sell that? I hate fruitcake.”
Oh dear. I can only reply with a heartfelt rejoinder that I, too, hate the fruitcake that they have eaten. Year after year I would valiantly purchase a fruitcake at the store, only to be repelled by the amount of flour and raisins (hence the dreaded dryness) and the unrecognizable square bits (which turn out to be dyed rutabagas). The long list of ingredients, many of them chemicals, also adds to the general unpleasantness of the commercial product.
But there are also fruitcake haters among those who were the sad recipients of their grandmother’s or great aunt’s fruitcakes. A dear friend of mine told me he used to put butter on pieces of his grandmother’s fruitcake. That says it all, doesn’t it? Just because it’s homemade doesn’t mean it’s good.
So a world filled with people who scream “Fruitcake?!” at me has been created from the preponderance of terrible product. What a wonderful joy it is to force someone to taste mine and watch them go “What the? This is actually good.”
Nonetheless, the stereotype of the fruitcake persists. Just the other day I was reading an article in the Globe and Mail regarding a very old fruitcake. A man was cleaning out his attic and found a fruitcake that his mother had sent him 40 years earlier. “I was amazed that it hadn’t changed at all,” he said. The idea that it lasts for eternity adds a great deal of mirth to the product, for sure. People (mostly males, curiously) will say something to that effect “hey these things last for years, don’t they?” as though that adds a certain scary element to them.
When people look at me quizzically, and ask why in the world I want to make fruitcake, I tell them it’s because I am going to change fruitcake haters into fruitcake lovers one person at a time. In the words of my hero, Pierre Trudeau, “Just watch me.”