As I was lining the baking pan for my fruit cake, the same way I do every year, it occurred to me that the process probably wasn't necessary.
The original recipe calls for you to line the pan with a paper grocery sack, however, try to find one that isn't covered in dye, wax, BPA plasticizers, or worse these days is next to impossible. So, I use parchment. The process of lining the tin with greased paper was intended to help release the cake, and wrapping the tin itself in a double or triple layer of paper helped to insulate the cake during a long, relatively low temperature bake. Fruitcake is sticky and dense stuff after all, and earlier household ovens had large swings in temperature, if in fact you were able to control the temperature at all. They were smaller, and less well insulated, and the walls tended to become very hot. Contemporary ovens are decidedly less temperamental and comparatively spacious, and contemporary bakeware is thicker walled and is available in a variety of non-stick coatings, but I keep with tradition anyway.
The ritual, I'm convinced, creates the results I desire, though I have no evidence to back up my conviction. I do it, because it's the way my mother did it, and she does it, because that is how her grandmother did it. My observance of this ritual isn't slavish or thoughtless, to the contrary, I do it precisely because it conjures childhood memories, and in some intangible way connects me to members of my family tree that I was not fortunate enough to meet. The method, no matter how arduous is may seem today, goes back further than my great grandmother to a shared tradition common to my ancestors as well as other descendants of the English and Scottish heritage. And as a self professed Anglophile, I'm all too happy to try to take a walk in those shoes, any way I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment