When I was a kid, we had a wonderful minister with a sweet wife who taught me many things about food and life. Her name was Lizzie Ziegler, and one of her stories was one about Christmas oranges. When she was a little girl in the early 1900s, oranges were so rare and exquisite she would save part of the peeling, wrap it in a handkerchief and stick it in a sewing-machine drawer.
On a cold winter’s day, she could pull out a bit of the crumpled zest and inhale the very fragrance of Christmas memories.
When I think of Mrs. Ziegler, Proust’s madeleines come to mind. So does Nancie McDermott’s Orange Slice Cake With Orange Glaze. McDermott, author of “Southern Cakes” (Chronicle Books, $19.95), says the cake probably originated generations ago in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. During the bare years of the Depression, as Mrs. Ziegler would attest, fresh oranges were hard to come by, so the fruitcake-like concoction was made from the sugar-coated, faux-orange candy that was cheap and plentiful at the store. Apparently, the gemlike jellies evoked the essence of citrus in hard times — when not a single orange was available for the Christmas stocking.
“That touched me so,” said McDermott, who lovingly sifted through old recipes and documents when she was researching her delightful and indispensable “Southern Cakes.” “I saw many notes like ‘Memaw’s orange slice cake was the highlight of our Christmas.’ ”
Like many Southern kids of a certain age, I remember chopping nuts and candied fruit as my South Georgia grandmother made her glorious stacks of Lane Cake (based on Alabama native Emma Rylander Lane’s self-proclaimed “prize cake,” from Lane’s self-published opus of 1898) and Japanese Fruitcake (a heavenly stack of alternating spiced and plain layers with a lemony-coconut filling).
When I stopped by to see my Aunt Libby over Thanksgiving, she pulled out my grandmother’s Lane Cake recipe and told me that instead of the requisite bourbon, Nanny added red wine from my grandfather’s store in the tiny town of Climax. (A wise cook makes use of what’s handy, be it muscatel or moonshine.)
As she was leafing through her recipes, Aunt Lib pulled out instructions for Mrs. Dixon’s Ageless Fruitcake. She hadn’t a clue who Mrs. Dixon was, but when I wrote about the cake on Facebook, half of Decatur County claimed to have known a Mrs. Dixon who was legendary for her fruitcakes. (Different person, Aunt Lib said.)
“My daddy had a cousin who made these back in the day in a ring pan. Then she put them in a wax-papered tin and ‘bourboned them to death!’” wrote Joan Skipper Schoubert, a friend of mine from Bainbridge High School. “I still remember that heavenly smell when you opened the tin!”
Mrs. Dixon’s Ageless Fruitcake is now aging in layers of wax paper and tinfoil in a sealed plastic bag on Nanny’s sideboard in my cool, dark dining room. It is moist, delicious and easy to put together. The hardest thing about it is chopping the sticky candied cherries and pineapple, which you can find in the grocery store this time of year. (Full disclosure: Although Mrs. Dixon’s recipe does not call for alcohol, I poured a half cup of Bulleit over my finished cake — a tribute to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” in which Buddy and Sook brave the glowering Mr. HaHa Jones in pursuit of whiskey for their cakes.)
Driving home through Georgia pecan country after Thanksgiving, I stopped at Ellis Bros. Pecans in Vienna, where family matriarch Lucile “Cile” Ellis gave me a spiral-bound copy of her family’s self-published book of recipes. The Ellises’ recipe for Japanese Fruitcake — which uses cinnamon, allspice, cloves, raisins nuts and molasses in the spice layer — sounded tantalizing.
As McDermott points out, “Nothing about [Japanese Fruitcake] is remotely Japanese. Nor does it qualify as a fruitcake in any traditionally Southern definition of the word.” With Mrs. Ellis’ recipe and a little help on the filling from McDermott’s book, I came up with a version that would do Nanny proud. When I sliced and attempted to plate the towering four-layer pagoda, I remembered eating it at gatherings long ago, studded with toothpicks. You can’t get the fat layers to stay together and stand up straight once you slice it! Some cooks smother it all with a layer of white icing. But this is good enough for me, especially the gooey part where the lemon- coconut goodness soaks the bottom of the cake and sticks to the plate.
Come to think of it, you could use orange zest in place of lemon. In which case it would make a cake fit for Mrs. Ziegler. Goodness gracious, I wish I could take her a slice this Christmas.
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