Question:
You said that “Stir Up Sunday” is the Sunday before Advent, but it's really the Third Sunday in Advent – because that's the Sunday that has the “Stir Up” collect. Also, I was wondering if you had a good recipe for fruitcake? My grandmother always made fruitcake, but she never taught us. The recipe we found in her belongs is no help at all - 29 cent package of this, 39 cent package of that...lol. sigh. Anyway, we have all agreed that a Harry and David Traditional Fruitcake is most like what she used to make. Any suggestions?
Answer:
Stir Up Sunday is an old tradition based on the 1662 prayer-book collect for the Sunday Next Before Advent. Christmas puddings (and cakes too, if you like) are made and steamed on that day, then set aside to soak up alcohol and age until Christmas, allowing the flavours of the fruit and alcohal to meld and mellow.
The collect is the reason it is called Stir-Up but you have the wrong collect. The old collect was "Stir up, O Lord, we beseech thee, the hearts of thy faithful people, that they plenteously bringing forth the fruits of good work may of thee be plenteously rewarded. Amen" . The stirring up of power is third week in Advent and that is WAY too late to be making puddings.
One of the reasons that Liturgical reform was opposed in the 1970's was that adiaphoric traditions, like stirring up figgy duff, bringing daffodils to you mother and eating simnel cake in Lent, and so on, were eroded. Capital-"T" liturgical Tradition looks for its precedents to the firstcenturies of the church, long before figgy duff and simnel cake were invented. But humans look for precedent to what happened when they were small boys (and girls) and to what stories their parents told, and resent losing those traditions. Another reason for opposing reform was that the Anglican communion throughout the world would lose some of its uniformity of practice. The relatively unchanging 1662 prayerbook, the same throughout the world, protected those traditions and practices -- but, unacceptably, at the expense of ecumenism, contemporary relevance, and the recovery of authentic Tradition.
The churches that retained the 1662 and achieved liturgical reform through an alternate service book are accomodating "t"-tradition while preserving "T"-Tradition. I suspect its more of a challenge for Americans to preserve their small-"t" traditions without strong word-of-mouth.
The Sundays in Advent already have their own focuses, encapsulated in their (1662) collects. As the Christian year prior to Christmas recapitulates history before Christ (what, 5000 years in four weeks -- good we're not expecting to do an in-depth analysis, eh?<g>), the collects in turn focus on:
- Advent I - The Creation in particular, and the book of
Genesis
- Advent II - Isaiah's prophecy in particular, The Law and
the Prophets, the gift of Holy Scripture
- Advent III - John the Baptist's ministry in particular,
ministry and evangelism
- Advent IV - The Blessed Virgin in particular, the immanence
of Christ and of God's Power in the world.That's why Anglicans have "Gaudete" and a pink candle for the fourth Advent Sunday, rather than the third Sunday as Roman Catholics do. That fourth Sunday is also when the 1662 BCP has the "Raise up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come among us" ... collect; but in the original English it's "Raise up" rather than "Stir Up".
Our (Canadian) BAS has, for the third Sunday of Advent,
"God of power and mercy you call us once again to celebrate the coming of your Son. Remove those things which hinder love of you, that when he comes, he may find us waiting in awe and wonder for him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever."
The BAS moves the "Stir-up" collect to Proper 23 -- which is okay for making dark fruit cake, but way too early for plum puddings. If you leaf through your 1979, you may find the "fruits of good work" translated to some other Sunday, too.
Ramblings on Fruitcake, Refrigeration, and History. Fruitcake is basically a pound cake with fruit, and optionally other ingredients, bound together by the cake.
In England, fruitcake was nearly a staple element of the diet in pre-refrigeration times. Food is preserved by placing it in an environment inimicable to bacteria. For example, you can heat it until all the bacteria are killed, and then seal the storage container. But pre-industrial technology didn't allow many foods to get hot enough, and didn't produce reliable seals. You can freeze the food, but outside twentieth-century technology only Inuit had the means for this method. You can dry the food, or saturate the food with salt, acid or sugar. These methods change the texture and flavour of the food; but if they're the only choice you've got, you can learn to like the changes.
Fruitcake is an example of preserving through sugar-saturation. The majority of the sugar is concentrated naturally in the dried fruits -- important because refined sugar is a late development, not known in the middle ages. Nuts, and even meat, mixed with the fruits provide protein. Letters and diaries of soldiers during the Great War (1914-1918) refer to the fruitcake in their field rations: tremendously rich and heavy, it provided much of a soldier's nutritional requirements for energy and protein, and lasted well without moulding or rotting, despite the total lack of proper food storage facilities. Interestingly, the Plains Peoples (the Cree and Tsitsika, and perhaps others) relied on the sugar in dried saskatoons, pounded together with dried buffalo meat, in much the same way.
Fruitcake stored properly will in fact last for decades. To store it properly, first run a skewer through the cake several times, all over it. Wrap it in cheese cloth and saturate the cheese-cloth with brandy for several weeks, until the cake has absorbed as much brandy as possible. Get an air-tight tin box about one inch bigger than the cake all round. Put an inch of pulverized sugar in the bottom of the box. Put in the cake, then fill all the remaining space with pulverized sugar. Seal the box.
This enduring quality of fruitcake is why it is the traditional cake for weddings. You could argue that the permanence of the cake is symbolic of the permanence of marriage; but I suspect the permanence of the cake's guaranteeing that you can serve it in any season of the year that the marriage takes place, is also an influencing factor. The American "traditional" white wedding cake is a much later development, introduced to underscore the superiority of a newly developed American milling technique that produced a very fine white flour. It is still very much an American idea. I had no idea that a wedding cake was "supposed" to be a white cake until I started reading brides magazines in planning my own wedding; Canadian and English wedding cakes are fruit cakes -- except of course for those tradition-flouting brides who are busy deciding between chocolate, and a yellow cake to match their wedding colours.
Still with me? I have no idea who Harry and David are (I doubt I have ever had a store-bought fruitcake). However, if you give me your grandma's recipe, I can make a stab at translating the proportions, based on recipes I have with similar ingredients. I have dozens of fruitcake recipes; ranging from quite ancient to quite modern, and with ingredients that might make your eyes cross (suet and chopped beef, for example). Modern fruitcakes are distinguished by being either dark (made with molasses and brown sugar; and aged at least six months) or light (made with white sugar and aged about six weeks) and by whether they have nuts or not.
Here is the archetypical (IMHO) light fruitcake. It's the one my mother used for my wedding cake; only she neglected to consider the fact that I'm allergic to pineapple and palm-kernal oil, so I got sick when I tried to eat some of it.
125 ml (1/2 cup) cold water
500 g (1 lb -- about 2 cups packed down) blond or light
raisins, or in a pinch whatever dried
raisins, currents, plums, apricots or figs
you can find. Needless to say, substitutions
change the flavour of your results).Boil the water and dried fruit together -- do not scorch them -- and let cool.
180 g (3/4 cup -- I think that's one and a half sticks) butter
(NOT palm-oil margarine!)
170 g (180 ml or 3/4 cup) white sugar, or in a pinch brown
sugar, and you'll have a dark fruitcake. The
darker the sugar, the darker the cake.Cream the butter and sugar together.
3 eggs (that's the same metric or American!)
Beat well, then beat into the butter-sugar mix. I just pack the butter and sugar against one side of the mixing bowl, and beat the eggs in the other side, then gradually encroach the beaters on the butter/sugar clump. Saves on the washing-up that way.
125 g (250 ml or 1 cup sifted) flour 2 ml(1/2 tsp) Baking powder
Sift together. Stir half of the flour/BP mixture gently into the batter.
30 ml (2 Tbsp) milk
2 ml (1/2 tsp) lemon extract
75 to 125 ml (3 to 5 oz.) jar of marischino cherries -- use
only the juice at this step. The
precise size depends on what your
shop sells and your tastes (mine
sells 125ml jars, and I *like* the
flavour of marischino)Stir the liquids into the batter. Add the other half of the flour/BP mixture.
750g (1&1/2 lb -- about two cups packed down) mixed
dry/candied fruit. My preferred mixture is as
follows:
450 g (1 lb) candied fruit (NO pineapple!)
225 g (8 oz.) candied cherries
125 ml (5 oz.) jar of marischino cherries,
drained
65 g (125ml or 1/2 cup sifted) flourSpread the fruit on a large platter, and sift the flour over it, turning the fruit gently so it is coated with a thin layer of flour. Stir the fruit/flour mixture into the batter.
Line pans with four layers of oiled paper, to insulate the pans and ensure that none of the batter dries out during baking, but rather steams slowly. Fill the pans almost full, as the fruit greatly out-weighing the batter, the cakes hardly rise at all. The above recipe will fill one 20-cm (8-inch) square cake tin about 8 cm (3 inches) deep; or one loaf pan with an awkward scrap left over -- perfect for a mini-loaf pan. Bake in a low oven (325 degrees) for 1&1/2 to 2 hours: test with a toothpick for doneness. After an hour of baking, cover the tops with oiled paper to prevent drying.