Christmas Cake

Dearest Rachel –

Over the weekend leading up to Christmas, I needed to go out to get various ingredients for the cooking assignments I’d taken upon myself for both the family party on the Sunday prior and Christmas brunch itself. As is my wont, I can never go through a grocery store and only get the few things I’ve decided I needed beforehand; I will almost inevitably purchase one or another thing that I spot as being on sale. While I recognize this weakness in myself, I take comfort in the fact that you would be understanding about it. After all, there were more than a few evenings when I would come home and you would brag about this or that item you found on clearance in one place or another. So I know that, rather than admonishing me for my wastrel ways, you’d be more likely to praise me for spotting a bargain – just as long as I took care to actually use my additional purchase before it went bad or stale or what have you.

On the other hand, you might just have been a little perplexed at what I brought home from this particular trip. It so happened that there was a sale on panettone, a baked good for which the closest description I can give is that it’s Italy’s idea of a fruitcake. Rather than being heavy and dense like a brick, it’s light and somewhat fluffy; it even straddles the line between bread and cake in terms of texture, although it’s much too sweet to truly be considered bread (especially in Europe, where the limit on sugar in bread is such that even Subway’s sandwich loaves are legally considered to be ‘cake’). When we would shop at the long-since defunct European grocery in our area, we would occasionally see it, and find ourselves mildly intrigued by the display, but since neither of us were keen on a baked good with various fruits and nuts scattered throughout it, we didn’t give it much in terms of serious consideration.

However, this particular display caught my attention, since the fruits and nuts had been replaced… with chocolate chips. Now that would have had your attention just as much as mine, I shouldn’t wonder. And being marked down by a couple of bucks, to the point of hardly amounting to a dent in my wallet, well… why not give it a try? So I added it to the pile of purchases I ‘needed’ and headed out. If nothing else, I figured I could bring it to the folks’ on Christmas and the family could enjoy it together, along with everything else we all had planned in terms of food for that day.

Which is, of course, part of the problem. When everybody gets together as a family on a holiday like Christmas, the dining table sags just as it does on Thanksgiving. There’s more leeway in terms of what’s there, as the November holiday has its certain set menu that only gets adjusted by small degrees on the periphery, but that simply means that, there is already a wide volume of comestibles to choose from and enjoy as well as a broad variety. As such, the panettone wound up sitting in their refrigerator the entire time, and on into the subsequent weekend.

Only when I came in to the office the following Monday was I encouraged to take it home, as Mom wasn’t about to eat it herself (and I’d left some of the soufflé ingredients behind as well, and needed to bring them home, too). I mentioned that it could stay with them until New Year’s; while our fridge at home wasn’t exactly crammed full of stuff, it certainly had more in it than the folks’, so it seemed better to keep it and see if we could open it up and try it out over the second holiday in as many weeks.

I won’t call it a disappointment, but it wasn’t exactly what any of us were expecting, to be honest. In terms of texture, it felt like a giant cupcake, complete with a corrugated paper wrapper that was surprisingly difficult to peel away from it, it was that sticky. It wasn’t easy to cut into appropriate sections, either – supposedly, it listed one sixth of it as being a single portion, but cutting individual wedges out of it wasn’t nearly as easy (or as neat) as the picture on the box made it look. And as I mentioned, its mouthfeel was almost like bread rather than cake. None of us wanted much of it on New Years – it was just “too much like work,” as Ellen likes to put these things – and I had to bring more than half of it home.

So as of this past Monday, I found myself staring at this leftover bread-cake from Christmas, and realizing that I was going to need to finish it off at some point, in order to get my money’s worth out of it, despite it having been a supposed bargain at the time I purchased it. If it’s not used, it doesn’t matter how little was paid for it – that was money wasted. So over the past couple of days, I’ve been sawing off a segment as part of my breakfast, and only just polished it off today.

I will say that it didn’t seem particularly stale or anything, despite being over two weeks since I bought it (and nearly two weeks since the holiday it was meant to be eaten over), and it got me to thinking about a different kind of Christmas cake, which I’ve told you about in the past.

Now, from a purely literal standpoint, it’s possible that sponge cake, whipped cream and strawberries are not meant to last for two weeks, even when properly refrigerated, as compared to the bready panettone, so maybe the comparison is between apples and oranges. And as we all know from our taste for sushi, the Japanese measure freshness in terms of hours, whereas we content ourselves with days out of necessity. But it does seem ridiculous to think that a confection suddenly goes bad when the dateline crosses from December 25th to the 26th; forget leftovers, all you can do with a Christmas cake is to throw it out as undesirable. I get that the season that inspires its consumption is over, and so it seems strange to indulge at that point, but the thing’s still good. When a reel explains all this and asks “would you eat a Christmas cake after Christmas?” I think I’ve just answered that question in the affirmative (which I dare say would please you, given your “waste not, want not” attitude).

But of course, the reel was also speaking figuratively, because it’s apparently still stigmatic for a Japanese woman to be unmarried after twenty-five. Of course, it’s also addressed to a considerably younger audience, so if the answers were to be tallied up, it might make for an interesting split. However, seeing as I’m something of a spear counterpart to the concept, I’d say that my breakfasts for the past few days could be taken as a metaphoric answer as well. The only difference is that it might be difficult to find a ‘cake’ willing to be offered to one such as myself; those in the bakery have no agency to object to their purchaser, but those on the open market, if you will, still have their limits. They might rather stay on the shelf than be brought home by the likes of myself, much as I might wish otherwise.

And with that having been said, honey, I’ll need to ask you to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck, as I’m going to need it.