Fondness for fruitcake weather
Years ago I caught a black and white film midway through, but I can recall the story as vividly as if I had seen it yesterday from start to finish.
A short story by Truman Capote that chronicled a fall-winter season shared by an old woman and a young boy. The old woman could feel fruitcake weather in her bones in the fall of the year and the young boy was seen standing in a cabin-like kitchen stirring a bowl of baking ingredients.
At Christmas, the two exchanged kites each had fashioned for the other. In the final scenes the two were flying the kites on a nearby hillside, with the young boy racing ahead into a future you knew would be without the woman, who was probably his grandmother. The huge affection, and the outright expressions of love between the two, has always stayed in my heart.
Plum pudding and hard sauce was always a big deal in the Victorian family I once married into. Long before Christmas I would assemble the ingredients, including suet from the butcher, and fill a bundt pan to steam for hours in the canner on my stove.
Trying to flame the dessert at the Christmas table always met with little success and there was always lots of pudding left over. I didn’t know to pour the whole bottle of rum into the batter. Over time I discovered how comparatively easy it was to bake a fruitcake, sprinkle powdered sugar over it and serve it up as close to the original Christmas tradition.
Recently I discovered Christmas Cake In A Jar and set about creating the best fruitcake of all time. All I had to do was cream sugar and butter, add six eggs, flour, molasses, allspice and the fruit that was in the jar and proceed to bake in a pan of water for 3 1/2 hours. The glaze was powdered sugar and whipping cream out of a can. Terrific!
Because Mike grew up in the Osoyoos area he remembers the Zucca melon and its transition to candied peel from the 1930s into the 1950s.
Here is some trivia on the Zucca melon, which came to the Okanagan when the war prohibited the importation of citrus peel. This African gourd loved the long hot summers here after seeds were smuggled into Canada from California. The fruits weigh 60 to 120 pounds each. They have been described as a cross between a vegetable marrow and a hippopotamus.
After the melons were harvested they were stacked like cord wood onto trucks and shipped out by train or truck for processing in Penticton, Osoyoos or Vancouver. The leaves of the plant are over a foot in diameter and feel soft and pliable, like a cross between chamois leather and velvet.
How women working in canneries made Zucca into candied peel is a story in itself.
The Zucca is tasteless and the flesh colourless but, when colour and spices were added the unprocessed fruit was big business and the “peel” was shipped across Canada to fill fruit cakes like the one I baked last month. The giant but delicate plant consumed soil fertility so other crops such as turnips replaced the Zucca in the food industry.
The Zucca was once so common a cash crop in the Okanagan it was taken for granted. When it ceased to be of commercial value, attention was placed on new items, shifting with the food fashions of the times.
Perhaps the Zucca inspired the Jack and the Beanstalk nursery rhyme. Today, two seed companies in Canada offer Zucca seeds.
Visitors here for turkey soup and lunch reminisced about their early years growing up in Kelowna and how every family had a vegetable garden and an apple orchard. When I came to Kelowna in the early ’70s that was still the city, featuring one blue bus back and forth to town from the Mission with the driver, Buster Hall, knowing every passenger by name.
The neighbourhoods where horses (my daughter rode her horse, Tip, across the meadow that now holds OKM) used to be kept are now densely populated residential areas. Time will tell what new growth will bring, perhaps new gardens and trees and only fond memories of the fruitcakes and holiday specialities of the past.
Young people need only seek out a senior for stories about the history of our valley — and it’s all in living colour. I predict the future will taste great and the colours will be bright. The future will bring the music of laughter, the warmth of friendship and seniors spreading joy wherever they go.
Jeanette Dunagan is an Okanagan artist who has lived in Kelowna for more than 40 years. Her column appears every second week in the Okanagan Saturday. Email her at jd2399@telus.net.