Did you know that fruitcake helped build a cathedral in Germany?
No, not by using cakes for the bricks — as the joke might go. It was more about something called the “Butter Letter.”
More on that later, but first a little history on what we know today as a brandy- or rum-soaked, sugar-loaded, fruit-laden cake sold by several monasteries in the United States and known by many names and recipes across Europe.
While some historians date fruitcake to the ancient Egyptians who put preserved cakes inside the tombs of their families, fruitcake as we know it would more properly date to ancient Rome. Soldiers were given cakes for rations. They were more like modern energy bars, made of barley, nuts, raisins, pomegranates and honey, pressed down and dried.
Moving into the Middle Ages, we find similar bar or dried cakes, but with the addition of spices from the East and more fruits that came from around the Mediterranean Sea. Later, butter was added, and the bars grew more into what we would recognize as cakes and even pastries. One of these was the Twelfth Night (Jan. 6) fruit and spice cake — probably with alcohol in it — that topped off the Christmas season.
With the lengthening of the Lent and Advent penitential seasons, the use of butter was forbidden in food as were sweets like honey. This began to affect several special treats in the 11th century with the Crusades, and continued into the 13th century, especially in Germany and with what we know as stollen. Stollen is a Christmas treat and its shape is meant to remind us of the swaddling clothes of Baby Jesus. However, with the food restrictions of Advent, it was hard for bakers to prepare stollen in advance of Christmas.
Add in the fact that, in Saxony — part of Germany — butter was cheaper to use and more readily available than oil, which was allowed in food during Advent, and you had some bad feelings.
Prince Ernst of Saxony appealed for an exemption to Pope Nicholas V in 1450. However, it was not until four popes later — Pope Innocent VIII in 1490 — that papal permission was received. This pope’s letter became known as the “Butter Letter” or “Butter Brief.” It was specifically meant for Saxony and for stollen, but it changed the baking history of Advent and Christmas as well.
This is where Freiburg Cathedral comes in. Freiburg is in lower Saxony. Whenever anyone broke the butter use rule, they had to pay a fine to the church. Pope Innocent granted butter usage — but only to the bakers’ households. Anyone else who used butter still had to pay the fine. However, the money was now to stay local and went to the cathedral, which was under construction at the time. The cathedral was started in the 13th century and was not finished for 300 years. It is now known as “Freiburg Minster” (and named the Cathedral of Our Lady). It is owned — as it always has been — by the people of Freiburg.
The next big step toward the fruitcake we know today came with the colonization of the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries. This adds a dark side to fruitcake because the advances made in baking at the time were due to the increased and cheap access to sugar. Sugar came from Caribbean plantations and was harvested by slaves.
Sugar became an important way to preserve fruit for winter months. This new addition in the kitchen allowed people to make a wide variety of candied fruit, including cherries, raisins, currants, cranberries, lemon and orange slices, dates and even pineapple. These candied fruits became a welcome addition to cakes and breads.
The richness of fruitcake increased its popularity. It probably reached a high point with the 1840 wedding of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert. Their wedding cake was really a fruitcake. It weighed 300 pounds and was dominated by plums in the batter and topped with royal icing.
Across the ocean in the United States, fruitcake became popular for another reason — it shipped well across far-flung territory. The founding of Rural Free Delivery (1896) and the Parcel Post (1913) led to mail order food delivery, including fruitcakes in tins.
In 2017, the longevity of fruitcake was proven by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust which found a fruitcake from 1910 in a hut on Cape Adare in East Antarctica. This was where British explorer Robert Falcon Scott led a 1910-1913 expedition.
This durability of fruitcake allowed several monasteries to bake and sell it for fundraising via mail order. For example, the monks at Assumption Abbey in Ava, Mo., were making concrete blocks to sell in the early half of the 20th century. As demand for cement blocks faded, the monks turned to baking. Today, they make more than three tons of fruitcake to ship each year.
The Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Ky., began baking fruitcake for sale in the 1950s and made some 90,000 pounds of it in 2016.
Other abbeys and monasteries make and sell fruitcake, including the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Piffard, N.Y. (they also make “Monks’ Bread”), the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Ga., and the Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Ore. On Dec. 18 of this year, the Assumption Abbey in Ava posted on their website: “We are sold out of cakes. All orders placed now will not be shipped until mid-January 2024.”
Despite the jokes, fruitcake remains popular. But why do monks bake them? It’s not just for the monetary reward — although abbeys and monasteries must find ways to support themselves. An answer came from a Trappist monk speaking to National Public Radio in 2016.
“Traditionally, grandmothers made fruitcake,” said Br. Paul Quenon of the Abbey of Gethsemani, “but it became commercialized and lost its personal touch.” The monks clearly have found the fruitcake to be a way to blend work and prayer, with the addition of that homemade touch that makes Christmas even sweeter.
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