Rachel Laudan

Falling from Grace: Dried Fruits and Nuts (Frutos Secos)

Funny the difference words can make to food.  When I learned Spanish, I learned that the term frutos secos, dried fruits, included nuts as well as what the English called dried fruits.  In Spanish, frutos secos are divided into those without hard shells (raisins, figs, etc) and those with shells you have to crack (almonds, walnuts, etc).  The fruits of the earth, a phrase that goes back to Roman times, much broader than now.

Now I see English Christmas in the 1950s as an orgy of frutos secos. Rationing was finally, finally coming to an end and those who remembered the freely available sugar and fat of the 1930s were eager to have it again.

currantsThe beginning of December was the time for making mincemeat and Christmas puddings.  My mother set aside an evening, everyone gathered around the kitchen table, and she produced tiny currants, larger raisins, and golden translucent sultanas, ground almonds, and spices that she had ordered from the grocer. The currants, raisins and sultanas had to be washed and seeded, a sticky task time-consuming task.

Beef_suet-01If we were using fresh beef suet (lovely, lovely stuff by the way), the membranes had to be picked out and it had to be ground. Often, though, we simply used packets of Atora beef suet.

My grandmother usually had the tedious job of rubbing bread through a horsehair sieve to make soft, fine breadcrumbs. SieveThese, along with the dried fruit, chopped apple, grated carrots, suet, eggs, and a little milk were tipped into the big mixing bowl for the Christmas puddings.

We children ritually shut our eyes, stirred, and made a wish. Usually I wished for a present.

mixing bowlIf the weather was cold, I wished that the pipes would not freeze. They brought spring water from the tank above the stables at the far end of the house.  Because the stone walls were so thick they had been run along the outside. No water was not such a problem for the family but we always had a few buckets set aside. But the thirty or forty hungry calves in the barn across the yard had to be fed with milk twice a day, milk mixed with water from the taps outside the kitchen window and powdered milk from the sacks in the feed store. Frozen pipes spoilt everything as my father, balanced on a ladder with a blow torch, shouted directions as he tried to get the water running.

But back to dried fruit and nuts. The puddings were packed into basins, topped with waxed paper held on with knotted knicker elastic under the lip of the bowl. Next morning they were Pudding basinsteamed for hours until black and soft, the individual dried fruits now indistinguishable. Then they were stored in the pantry, some for the current year, some for the following year. There was no need for refrigeration.  And the mincemeat, more dried fruit, apples, spices, and suet, was cooked and put in jars.

A week or two later, it was time to make the Christmas cake using the same ingredients except that flour substituted for breadcrumbs, butter for suet.  The mixture was spooned into a round tin and baked.

A few days before Christmas, my mother made the mince pies, “a right fiddle” as she always Mincepie tinsaid. She collected the patty pans and cutters, made a quantity of short crust pastry, rolled out sheets, cut the bottoms for the pies and patted them into the pans, added a tablespoon of mincemeat to each, and a swish of beaten eggs, then more rolling, cutting the smaller tops, patting them on, and another swish of beaten egg. After baking these were stored in a cake tin.

On Christmas Eve, we mixed icing sugar, egg white, and ground almonds to make almond paste and joy, joy, rolled it out nibbling it, to shroud the cake. Then

With icing and marzipan.

we made the royal icing and that went on top. And best of all it was decorated with small reindeer and Christmas trees, and bound around with a gaudy fringe.

Then came Christmas day. Following the main course at midday, everyone had a small slice of Christmas pudding with a tablespoon of brandy poured over it, even the children, and good cream on the side.

Made by photographer's grandmother.

 

 

 

At tea time, there was Christmas cake along with the Christmas crackers.

And in the evening, when relatives assembled, on the side tables in the sitting room were the dates1-300x224other Christmas frutos secos which we had been strictly forbidden to touch until that moment: sticky dates in long chipboard boxes, dried figs in round chipboard boxes, marzipan, sugared plums for my father, sugar mice, and a big wooden bowl of nuts to crack—walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and brazil nuts.

nuts

And finally there were mince pies.

When I moved to the United States, I dragged along a mixing bowl, pudding basins, and patty pans. I made pudding and mince pies every year, though not the cake. They were surprisingly popular with friends and family though a good bit of ground work had to be done. Mince pies were sweet not savory, I explained, the equivalent of Christmas cookies. And the pudding was so rich that a couple of bites were enough.elva-plums

Judging by the stores in Girona in northern Spain that I visited last Spring frutos secos are still very popular there.

But in the United States (and I suspect in Britain) they are not the sugary, fatty treats they once were. Chocolate has swept all before it in the sweet line. And just plain nuts don’t stand up to roasted and salted and caramelized nuts for many people.

I don’t say this with regret. Tastes in food change.

Two American friends have been writing about these Christmas treats.  Cindy Bertelson has resurrected an older piece by Cliff Doerkson on mince pies as they once were when they contained meat.   That’s a whole other thing.  And Anne Bramley talks about mince pies as they now are.

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10 thoughts on “Falling from Grace: Dried Fruits and Nuts (Frutos Secos)

  1. waltzingaustralia

    Takes me back to my youth. My grandmother, who moved to the U.S. from Canada, would make plum puddings for everyone she knew, and to do that, she saved coffee cans all year, and I can remember standing with her in the kitchen, filling coffee cans with the batter for the puddings. I thought they were wonderful — and I still love a good steamed pudding, though I hardly ever make them now. As for the dried fruit and notes, those, along with an orange, were what we found in our Christmas stockings. Wonderful memories. Thanks for the glimpse into your past with puddings.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      I’d never heard of Stir-up Sunday until a couple of years ago. And I believe Anne Bramley who looked into the matter a couple of years ago, found great difficulty in finding anyone in the British Isles who had heard of it. You might ask her.

  2. John Mulcahy

    Thanks Rachel – My mother, at 79 years old, still does most of that here in Ireland – especially the pudding. Our Christmas dinner just would not be the same without it! My guess is that, outside the cities, that would still be the norm here.
    Looking forward to seeing & meeting you in Dublin for the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium in May.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Thanks for the interesting comment, John. Perhaps being in the US I over-estimate how much this tradition has slipped. And I look forward to meeting you too.

  3. C.M. Mayo

    Hola Rachel, Merry Christmas and happy 2016! Well, this is my favorite of all your posts so far. It made me smile many times, and reminded me of my grandmother, who was from New England-come-to-Chicago stock. In other words, very Yankee. She always made a mince pie at Thanksgiving, to accompany the pumpkin, and the mince was purchased, I recall seeing jars. At Christmas– by my time this was in California– she usually made something chocolate, and always served slices of her home-made fruitcake which was heavy on the cherries and candied pineapple, in addition to raisins and nuts and sherry. I have tried many fruitcakes in my time and have yet to find one better than my grandmother’s. Both mince pie and fruitcake are acquired tastes, I think. In my experience kids go straight for the chocolate.

    PS I recall dishes of plain nuts to be cracked. I haven’t seen that in years. Oh, I think we have too many cans and too much corn syrup.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Catherine, I am just amazed the number of people who have happy memories of mince pie and fruitcake. And I love a bowl of nuts to be cracked. A soothing fiddle during long conversations.

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