Aunt Hennie's Fruit Cake

This morning I laid down the fruit cakes.

Let me explain…

Most all of us have family traditions with roots back to our childhood. Sure, they can be quirky and idiosyncratic, but cherished nonetheless. One of the ones that bubbled up for me recently was homemade fruit cake—far better than store-bought—which was deemed an essential contribution to the Schaub family Christmas hoopla. lovingly assembled by my Mom's older sister, Aunt Hennie.

As it happens, Hennie and I share a birthday (a sure omen of astral connection). She was born in a two-story frame house built on the open prairie 20 miles west of Chicago in 1899 and lived a homesteading life growing up. Over the years, of course, the inexorable march of the suburbs gradually overtook her and today the house—which still stands—is located smack in the middle of an established residential neighborhood in Elmhurst Il. 

As the acorn that wandered furthest from my suburban upbringing, I helped start Sandhill Farm  a homesteading community in northeast Missouri when I was just a callow youth of 24. One serendipitous result of that was that I was the beneficiary of much homesteading equipment that had been languishing in Hennie's basement, looking for a good home. I'm talking about a major league cabbage shredder (think sauerkraut in quantity), a bunch of ceramic crocks, a start of hard-to-find black currant cuttings, and a massive wooden butcher block contributed by my mother. 

In any event, Hennie got along in years (it's a trend, I've noticed) and at some point she was no longer able to deliver the fruit cakes. I believe that ended in the 80s, but the memory persists and she passed along the recipe. Once or twice my sister Tracey had a go at it, and another time my daughter Jo did a batch. This fall, in the Year of Quarantine, I decided it was my turn in the barrel and I took advantage of my weekly trips to Mayo Clinic (in Sept and Oct) to lay in a supply of dried fruit and nuts.

Not finding a ready source of dried orange and lemon peel, I made my own (isn't that what homesteaders do?). I chopped and combined all the fruit, nuts, and spices in late October and the sticky conglomeration all went into an airtight container where it marinated in a sacred concoction of brandy and whiskey. This got carefully stirred and replenished from time to time until yesterday, when it the baking happened!

This entailed creaming sugar and butter until my arm cramped, adding the fruit, and finally some. flour before pouring it all into tins (think banana bread size) and slowly baking for a couple hours.

They turned out beautifully and I'm now in the finally stage. This morning I took the cooled down cakes (there are four) and wrapped them in brandy-soaked cotton cloth (did you notice the alcohol theme?) and then in tin foil to retard evaporation of the precious liquor. They now rest on the basement floor in an airtight container for two weeks of seasoning. They'll be ready Dec 17—just in time to be mailed to my kids for a renewed under-the-tree tradition.

What could be a more loving gift?

Famous Wafers and Whipped Cream

Like a lot of people, I have childhood memories of certain foods and dishes that immediately evoke a sense of family. One of these is a dessert made with a relatively obscure Nabisco product styled Famous Chocolate Wafers. They are thin, lightly sweetened (which makes them unusual right there), crisp chocolate wafers (about 2.5 inches in diameter) that are marketed in boxes of 40 wafers each. This product has been around for at least 60 years and has remained unchanged in all that time.

Last night I arrived in the Chicago area for the start of a five days of FIC meetings. While the meetings will all take place at the north side facilities of Jesus People USA (an evangelical Christian group that focuses on the spiritual inspiration found in Jesus' words and acts), Ma'ikwe and I stayed the first night with my sister and brother-in-law, Alison & Dan Cooke in southwestern suburb of La Grange. For dessert last night Al offered up a batch of Famous Wafers and Whipped Cream. Yum!

What a madeleine was for Proust, a serving of Famous Wafers and Whipped Cream is for me—instantly bringing up images of my mother and family celebrations of summers long ago.

While this Schaub tradition goes back as far as I can remember, if you Googled it, the recipe would most commonly be classified as a "refrigerator cake." Simply enough, you trowel about 1/4-inch or so of whipped cream between wafers until you assemble a log that's about 12 inches long. After parging all the outer edges with additional whipped cream, you wrap the whole in waxed paper and refrigerate it overnight. The moisture in the whipped cream seeps into the wafers, rendering them soft and gooey. When unwrapped the next day, the log is sliced thinly along the diagonal, resulting in zebra-striped oblongs that are sinfully delicious—that is, they're delicious if you like sugar, chocolate, and butterfat. Duh.

The trick to this dessert is not in the execution, which is relatively straight forward—it's in finding Famous Wafers in a grocery store. Few carry this old-time Nabisco offering, and even if they're in the store, they're generally not found in the cookie section. For some reason, they're most commonly hanging out amongst the ice cream toppings.

Last night, over pre-dinner Manhattans (a penchant for which has become a mini-family tradition for him and me) my brother-in-law Dan waved in my direction by confessing that he regularly reads this blog. Who knew? He works for a company that manages commercial property and said he had little trouble applying my musings about cooperative group dynamics to corporate settings—which I liked hearing. (After all, if you're trying to save the world, you need broad application.)

He further confessed that he aspired to see his name appear in some future blog entry. He reasoned that bribing me with the right dessert should do the trick, and he was right!

Hey Dan, this blog's for you! (And if you want to try working me over with plum pudding and hard sauce at some future dinner, I promise a second coming.) With the right dessert, you too can be an (almost) Famous Waver. We could make it a new family tradition.

I'll Be Home for Christmas; Just Not in My Own Bed

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. As I’ve promised Ma’ikwe that I’d unpack some of those meanings in a blog series, this seems as propitious time as any to begin…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to nor ever truly free ourselves from.

Here’s the outline of my series:

—home as family

—home as place

—home as culture

—home as routine

—home as work

In this first entry, I’ll focus on Home as Family.

Home for the Holidays
Christmas is coming! Whether or not the goose is getting fat or I place a penny in an old man’s hat, I’m going to be with family—which is something I look forward to with relish (often made with cranberry at this time of year). I’m typing this in the partly sunny skies of northern Arizona as Ma’ikwe, Jibran, and I zoom west along I-40, inbound for a rendezvous with my son Ceilee, his wife Tosca, and his daughter (my granddaughter) Taivyn for the long Christmas weekend. Ceilee’s mother (and my ex-partner and dear friend) Annie flew in from Virginia yesterday, and my daughter (Ceilee’s sister) will join us Christmas Day. Ma’ikwe’s got Paul Simon’s 1991 Concert in the Park cranked up on the tape player, and we’ll be there by dinner. Life is good.

When I was growing up, I did Christmas with my parents. By my late 20's, after having a kid of my own, Annie and I started Celebratign Christmas at Sandhill. Now the wheel has turned again, and we parents are traveling to our son's. It's both different, and exactly the same.

While it's important to me to protect time with my kids as much as possible, I especially cherish being with them at holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, where it is possible to suspend one’s everyday routines to be with loved ones for days at a time. Thus, today I’m driving home to family. Even though Sandhill, where my mail comes, is 1000 miles in the rear view mirror, in the sense of the word I’m exploring today home is wherever my family is. Thus, if we‘re all together in one spot, then that location is assuredly home.

This year the timing is nearly perfect. We'll arrive within minutes of when Ceilee is expected to get off work Wed afternoon, and we'll depart Monday morning, just as he's due to head back in.

Home for the Holidaze
As it happens, Ceilee and Tosca live in Las Vegas (the glitzy one in Nevada; not the sleepy one in New Mexico), which is perhaps as great a testament to consumption and excess as one can find. The lights of Ceilee’s Christmas tree will be backlit by the never-extinguished twinkle of The Strip, just a few miles to the northeast. (Given Las Vegas’ tireless efforts to promote itself as a major sports venue, you might think of it as the Magi meets Mammon in the best two of three falls.)

While Ma’ikwe, Annie, and I have consciously chosen lives of inconspicuous consumption (at least by first world standards), my son has not and it’s a measure of our love of family that we’re not going to let a little materialism get in the way of a good time. We all like giving one another presents, and no one will be cheated out of the unwrapping ritual Friday morning.

The greater danger, when it comes to the Holidaze, is not so much getting caught up in a billboard driven urge to see Carrot Top live at the Luxor, as it is to not over-indulge in holiday spirits. In the end, no one is proof against libations with too much proof.

Home for the Hollandaise
There are a number of ways in which I bond and celebrate with my kids, including game playing (the internecine Siedler competition is downright fierce), butchering (we did that at Thanksgiving), eating and drinking (hence my cautionary note above), and even wilderness canoeing (we’re hoping to get up to the Northwest Territories next summer). But for all of that, there is perhaps nothing we enjoy doing together more than cooking. While everyone in the family enjoys dining out, we’re accomplished enough in the kitchen (and sufficiently vain about it) to begrudge a meal out when we can often prepare the same thing as well or better ourselves, and at a fraction of the cost.

Ma’ikwe and I have brought with us new crop piñons from the Land of Enchantment, so that we can prepare a dessert featuring vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and toasted pine nuts. And we couldn’t resist scooping up two-thirds of the fresh brussels sprouts last night at La Montañita (Albuquerque's local food co-op), knowing how terrific they’ll taste after having been kissed by a frost. We’ll steam them until barely tender and then smother them in home-made Hollandaise. Yum!

Of course, that’s just a taste. In five days there’s sure to be time for such family traditions as plum pudding, a roasted turkey, egg nog, baked garlic, and ribbon sandwiches, not necessarily in that order.

I can hardly wait to find out what we’ll cook up. Just like a little kid, I can hardly wait to be home for the holidays.

Dog Breath Berries

This week I'm stripping the black currant bushes. It's the end of the season and I'm spending an hour or so each afternoon before dinner diligently finding all the late-ripening berries on our 30 or so bushes. The patch is located just south of our new greenhouse, on the edge of our main garden, and berry picking is a meditation for me. Very centering. The patch is dense and I carefully, methodically work my way around one bush at a time, looking under each branch for the precious black fruit—about the size of a pea.

Sandhill Farm is now 35 years old, yet our black currant stock is much older than that. The scions came from my Aunt Hennie's house in Elmhurst IL, carefully transplanted cuttings from her homesteading backyard—now smack in the midst of the Chicago suburbs. Hennie is my mother's ony sister and both of them were born in that house—Val in 1917 and Henrietta in 1907, the duaghters of Johnnie and Gertie Golden. The two-story clapboard house with its steep winding stairs was built in 1899, and we have a picture in the family archives of the surrounding area just after it was built. At the advent of the 20th Century there were no other buildings in sight, just wind-swept prairie. Today you'd have to drive for more than two hours west to get a comparable sight.

As the suburbs gradually crept west, the Goldens kept their plot of land and continued a tradition of serious gardening. They still had chickens in my lifetime, and one of the highlights of the holidays was the homemade red currant jelly (stored in glass with a paraffin seal) that Hennie used to contribute to roast beef dinners, and the fruit cake she'd make every October (and soak in bourbon for two months before distributing it the form of carefully wrapped bricks to all her nephews and nieces under the Christmas tree). There was a long run of Concord grapes in the backyard and once we found several bottles of a forgotten vintage in the cellar, left over from when Johnnie & Gertie made communion wine during Prohibition. It was incredibly good.

The Goldens favored raspberries over strawberries, and currants over blueberries. When I moved to Sandhill in 1974, Hennie gifted me a set of ceramic crocks, a sauerkraut slicer, and and an asortment of various hand tools. It didn't occur to any of us (at first) that we might also need plants.

Upon arriving at Sandhill we enthusiastically purchased lots of fruit stock, almost all of which was easily obtained from mail-order nurseries. It turned out though, that black currant bushes were not obtainable. We learned that black currants serve as the alternate host for the fungus that causes White Pine Blister Rust and the forestry lobby (in the '70s) had sufficient strength to get black currants banned from interstate sale in an effort to contain this disease.

We were somewhat put out about the whole thing (given that white pine lives nowhere near us), but instead of calling Congress, we just called Hennie—and placed an order for some cuttings. She obliged and black currants are now firmly established in northeast Missouri—both at Sandhill and anywhere there's a neighbor who's requested starts over the years. While the ban on the sale of black currants plants has since been lifted, and you can now buy rootstock from nurseries, we're self-sufficient these days and no longer needing nursery help.

Black currants are a hardy bush that needs little attention. Too tart to be enjoyed fresh, they're best used in jams and in winemaking. While almost everyone I've met enjoys the wine, I've known many who were able to contain their enthusiasm for the task of picking the berries. The tedium of small fruit collection is typically relieved by the allowing harvesters to graze as they work. In the case of black currants, however, there's not much incentive.

In fact, we had a long-term member at Sandhill named Julez (she was with us 1988-95) who used to call them "dog breath berries," and it wasn't a term of endearment. I took it as a sign of her enduring affection for me (and perhaps the wine) that she'd agree to help pick the berries at all.

Tomorrow, I will dust off one of Hennie's 10-gallon crocks and continue a family tradition: I will begin a batch of black currant wine. When Ma'ikwe and I got married two years ago, I had reserved the entire 2006 crop of black currants to make 20 gallons of wine for the wedding. Although Hennie did not live long enough to see me get married (she'd died in the '90s), she was there in spirits.

And it raises my spirits each year as the new berries ripen and I practice my heritage. This week in the agricultural cycle, my mantra goes something like this:

I am Laird
Son of Valborg
Nephew of Hennie
Picker of Berries
Vintner of Black Currant Wine
Keeper of Tradition
Celebrant of Life
L'Chaim