Christmas Fruit Cake

Christmas fruit cake is a dense cake loaded with dried and candied fruit, nuts and warm spices, soaked in rum or brandy, and made well ahead of the holiday it is named for. The alcohol is doing more than flavouring. Spirits act as a preservative, and the traditional practice of feeding a fruit cake, brushing it with more rum or brandy at intervals over weeks, both keeps it and deepens it. A properly fed fruit cake improves for months, which is why it is baked long before it is eaten and why it survives being posted. Raisins, currants, cherries and citron are the classic fruits. Mango appears in versions made where mango is what there is, which is a reasonable indication of how far the cake has travelled. It is a genuinely divisive cake. Its detractors have a point about the density and the candied peel; its defenders point out that most people's experience of it is a mass-produced one that was never fed. **This is not an African dish.** It sits in the Worldwide collection because the page exists and receives visitors, and removing it would break a working link.