I ate a 21-year-old fruit cake

Cookbooks as archives of private and public memory

My paternal grandmother’s Joy of Cooking came to me after her death. In his grief, my Granddad chose to remarry and cast aside the objects that reminded him of his first wife. My aunt rescued a few items from the purge and gifted the cookbook to me, her eldest grandchild.

The cookbook is an archive of private and public memory—a channel for conveying memories from one generation to the next. Until recently, cookbooks were relegated to a category of “woman’s activities” and thus invisible to scholarly research. But as Janet Theophano asserts in Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote, it is that ordinary entanglement with women’s daily life that transforms cookbooks into “meditations, memoirs, diaries, journals, scrapbooks, and guides.” Viewing cookbooks as objects of study pushes back against the symbolic annihilation that threatens to erase women’s labor.

For all the mockery of food bloggers who include extensive preambles before they get to the promised recipe, cookbooks and recipes have always captured more than a list of ingredients and cooking directions. In "Recipes for Theory Making," Lisa Heldke intertwines reflections on cooking and philosophical inquiry to suggest that recipes offer us a range of ideas that we can accept or refuse. Inexperienced cooks might accept a recipe in every detail, while more confident cooks will refuse an ingredient or preparation step as unsuitable for the situation at hand.

Irma Rombauer published Joy of Cooking in 1931. Like Milwaukee’s Lizzie Kander, author of the popular Settlement Cookbook, Rombauer was a child of German immigrants. Rombauer channeled her grief after her husband’s death into a cookbook that is now in its ninth edition and considered the most popular American cookbook.

Grammie’s Joy of Cooking is the sixth edition; the flyleaf is marked with “Dec. 1978.” The red ribbon bookmarks are faded and frayed at the ends and she marked her name inside the cover with a purple return address sticker.

Given the December date, I suspect the cookbook was a Christmas gift, likely from her teenage sons. As I flipped gently through 915 pages, I noticed she had only marked 15 recipes with her customary recipe ranking. It was clear from the wrinkled pages in the Savory Sauces and Salad Dressings chapter that she had cooked other recipes, but I focused my attention on the recipes she had annotated.

Our recipes reveal intimate details about what we enjoy, what ingredients are available or affordable, and what preparation methods we prefer. The recipes Grammie chose were healthy, straightforward, and generally in the baking chapters. She cooked dried bean soup (very good), cream of cauliflower soup (excellent), and crab cakes (fair). Her annotations on the fruitcake recipe show her comfort level with recipe adaptation—she substituted dried pineapple, figs, and dates for the currants.

The Dark Fruit Cake recipe (excellent) was probably delicious when it was baked, but the only version I tasted was 21 years old. Rombauer assures her readers that “when they are well-saturated with alcoholic liquors…and are buried in powdered sugar in tightly closed tins, they have been enjoyed as long as 25 years after baking.”

Grammie took Rombauer at her word and baked me a wedding fruit cake when I was born. She stored the cake in their basement chest freezer, so I would peek at it throughout my growing-up years and wonder when my wedding day would come. Grammie died when I was 19 and my Granddad re-married when I was 21. In an anticlimactic moment, we decided not to burden Granddad’s new wife with a 21-year-old fruitcake and to just eat it. The fruit cake was dry, to be honest, but it was the last time I ate something made by my Grammie’s hands.

Now I am left with her cookbook.