Jar of Goodness 8.21.22: August 1993

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for August 1993.

That’s when Sue threw caution to the wind, got on a plane, and flew to Helena, Montana, for a vacation. And to visit me. And we’ve never truly been apart since then.

Each August, when the Perseids fly and we start getting a few cool breezes, I think about how in Helena the blanket flowers are having their heyday, the Archie Bray is having their annual Brickyard Bash, we’re quaffing Full Sail Golden Ales at Bert and Ernies and enjoying veggie sandwiches at the Old Windbag, and there’s someplace to go hiking among pine trees. Life was fine on South Raleigh. May we all recognize that today’s fine times are no less golden.

World's Best Fruitcake!

Maybe you’re thinking, “Ew, I hate fruitcake.” Too bad for you! Because with an attitude like that, you’ll miss out on something spectacular.

Today I’m celebrating a genuinely superlative fruitcake. The kind to swoon over. The kind to completely hide from people who “don’t like” fruitcake (pearls before swine) . . . and the kind to hide from people who like fruitcakes, too (’cuz no, it’s mine, all mine!). The kind you hide from everybody, because you want every crumb for yourself.

. . . To savor.

We are so happy to have an annual cross-continent gift exchange with our dear friends Steve and Sherri, who live in Seattle. We send them an assortment of my homemade cookies, and they send us one of Sherri’s homemade, made-from-scratch fruitcakes.

It’s totally not a fair exchange. What Sherri sends us is far, far beyond my feeble cookie gifts. (Sherri? Me dilettante, you master.)

I remember the few winters we spent together as neighbors in Montana. Steve and Sherri lived next door to us in an elderly duplex in Helena, midway between downtown and the capitol complex, the last house on South Raleigh as it ascended Sugarloaf Hill. I’ve never had such fun neighbors. One winter, after endless bitter cold, it finally, albeit prematurely, got up above freezing. At almost the same moment, Steve and I both emerged from our respective front doors, glanced at each other, and laughed at each others’ shorts. Look, it’s a heat wave! Steve grinned and purred, “Ahh, another balmy day in beautiful Helena, Montana!”

They are epicures, and they don’t take life too heavily. Steve mountain-biked all over town as well as in the nearby mountains. Sherri created lovely, elaborate dishes, apparently with complete ease, and the four of us had many meals together—often in our shared backyard, or on the front porch, with its gorgeous view of the sunsets behind Mount Helena.

Well, one winter, Sherri decided to put her formal culinary training (yes!) to use in making fruitcake from scratch.

Do you have any idea what that means? It was days in the making, because she candied her own fruit! Orange and lemon peel, apricots, pineapple, pears, cherries, you name it. Their apartment smelled like magic after Sherri spent whole days simmering fruits in sugar syrup. And Sherri used perfect, fresh, whole nuts—hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, you name it. And luscious prunes, figs, and dates. All this was in preparation for the actual construction and baking of the cakes.

These are works of art. There’s just enough cake batter to hold the gorgeous, colorful, translucent fruits and nuts together. If you slice it thinly enough, it looks like a stained glass window.

It really does.

And the flavor. Mercy!

I’ve been meaning to write again about fruits at Christmas, and how our parents and grandparents, and everyone before them, considered fruits at Christmas a real treat. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t get all kinds of fresh produce in midwinter. Winter was for cabbage, meat, and potatoes, over and over again. So dried fruits at Christmas were a treasure. They were expensive. Apricots, pears, apples, plums, cherries, grapes, strawberries. And fruitcakes celebrate that.

And so I celebrate fruitcake, specifically Sherri’s fruitcake, which we’ve been enjoying annually for several years now. Sherri, you’ve perfected it. In our humble opinion, you could serve this to the queen. You could sell this for about a million dollars. Nobody does it better. You rock.

So on December 25, once again, breakfast will be a slice of Sherri’s beautiful, precious fruitcake and coffee. Maybe the coffee will be elevated by a little Bailey’s Irish Cream, or Kahlua, Grand Marnier, or some such. It’ll have to be good to pair with the fruitcake.

Merry Christmas!

P.S. This year Sherri also sent us some homemade plum chutney! Her modest little comment on the card noted that the chutney was from their plum tree and that it is “pretty good with some blue cheese on a cracker.” . . . “Pretty good,” she says. When Julia Child or Jacques Pépin says something is “pretty good,” it’s time to sit up and take notice, because to us mere mortals, it means, “Try this, it’ll knock your socks off!” I can’t wait!

Bub’s Sangria

When I lived in Montana back in the 1990s, one of my coworkers shared with me a homemade cookbook—a smallish, green-covered loose-leaf job full of hand-typed recipes and hilarious commentary. The author, whom my coworker declined to identify (perhaps it was he himself), had apparently made the book just for fun. My coworker said he had encouraged this fellow to seek publication, but that he had repeatedly declined. Too bad!



I photocopied a few of the recipes, but I wish I’d copied the whole book.

The writer of this cookbook had adopted an alter-ego with the pseudonym “Snodgrass,” who was part hillbilly buffoon, part everyday Joe, a guy-in-the-kitchen making tasty chow with whatever’s available. Except this common Joe had an extraordinary vocabulary and wit. There’s a deceptively well-educated writer behind the bumbling cook sharing his culinary discoveries, describing his cooking techniques in hilariously perfect descriptive terms.

Today, I imagine this writer has a blog somewhere and is entertaining the hell out of his readers. I hope so. (Trust me, I’ve looked.)

And I hope the writer finds my post, here, and contacts me, because I’d like to thank him (her?) for creating such a fun cookbook. And like my coworker, I’d like to encourage him to seek publication—even if just an Amazon publication. Even if just online. And I’d love to credit him by name.

Below is one of the recipes I copied from “Snodgrass’s” little masterpiece. I hope you hoot at it just like I did when I first read it. By the way, it loses something when converted to prettified computer-kerned type. Its writer took great care in typing out the whole work in glorious Courier and hand-drawing text boxes and arrows, and affixing color prints on the pages. Yes, there were staged photographs of rustic characters sprinkled throughout the book, too. Apparently it was the author and his friends, in disguise.

After reading this recipe, you’ll wish I would also share the other recipe I copied from this book, three entertaining pages of “Wilson’s Legendary Incandescent De-Escalated Thermonuclear Enchiladas” . . . just as I wish I could peruse the entire “Snodgrass” cookbook again.

Enjoy! And if you are the original anonymous Snodgrass, I hope you’ll contact me.

33. Snodgrass’s Brother Robert’s Salubrious Native Fruit Elixir
and All-Purpose Inebriant

more generally known as

BUB’S SANGRIA

Snodgrass discovered the formula for this important health-food beverage during one of his latter-day expeditions to New England. Bub wrote it down on a piece of old Kleenex box and gave it to Wifey who lost it for several weeks before rediscovering it under a stack of five-week-old mail and paraphernalia on the kitchen counter.

This is an excellent way to dispose of about a gallon of cheap rot-gut Burgundy. It requires no cooking and very little proficiency in any enterprise other than pouring, mixing, and drinking. It does need to age at least a day after you’ve assembled it. The end product is a nice sharp fruity punch with certain edifying inebrious properties.

Bub’s original formula was for half a gallon of wyne. But Snodgrass has made a few strategic volumetric modifications in order to enhance the more efficient exploitation of metric wyne bottles. This recipe makes enough Sangria for a whole Sunday School picnic.

• a 3-liter jug of BURGUNDY or some other cheap RED WYNE
• 1½ cups of BRANDY
• ¾ cup of SUGAR
• 3 LEMONS—squoze
• 3 ORANGES—squoze
• 3 APPLES—sliced thin (greenish apples, Bub says)

1. Go down to the store and see what kind of BURGUNDY is on sale. Buy a 3-liter jug. When you get it home, drink 2 or 3 big mugfuls. You need that much space in the jug.
2. Squeeze Yr LEMONS and ORANGES into a big pitcher. And fish out the seeds. Pour in the BRANDY and the SUGAR and mix it up. Dissolve as much of the sugar as you can. Then pour it into the wyne jug.
3. Finally, slice Yr APPLES and stuff them into the jug with everything else. Shake it all up until everything seems to be properly scrambled and the sugar is dissolved.
4. Let it sit at least 24 hours before you drink it.

. . . Isn’t that a hoot? Wouldn’t you like to read more of Snodgrass’s recipes and culinary commentary?

In all seriousness, sangria is not exactly quantum physics; adjust everything to your tastes. Most people mix it in a big pitcher instead of stuffing the fruits all down the neck of a wine jug (as funny as that idea is). Basically, you fortify and sweeten the red wine with sugar and brandy and flavor it with sliced fruits; let it sit overnight, and the result should be rather syrupy and thick. Adjust flavors to taste. Sometimes I add some lemonade or orange juice.

Then, what most people do (which Bub’s recipe doesn’t mention—perhaps he misplaced the bit of Kleenex box this part was written on) is, upon serving, to add club soda or seltzer, or possibly a lemon-lime soda such as Sprite, to thin it out a bit and make it bubbly. Serve it over ice and garnish with fruit slices. A perfect punch for a hot summer evening!