Edith’s Four in One Fruitcake

Many years ago, the Missions Commission of the New Richmond United Methodist Church used to sell pecans and fruitcakes from Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia. Koinonia was founded in 1942 by two couples, Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England, who wished to live according to the gospel of Jesus. They shared a vision of a community where blacks and whites could live together in Christian love.

They first sold farm produce to support themselves, but white businesses and governmental agents boycotted and harassed them and forced Koinonia to find another way to generate the modest funds they needed. Thus began a mail order business selling pecans from their groves and other products made on the farm. They have an online store today.

In the 1950‘s and 60‘s Koinonia was attacked repeatedly, but the Koinonians remained true to their principles. They endured gunshots fired into their homes, the bombing of their produce stand, threatening phone calls and letters, demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan and pressure from the local Chamber of Commerce.

Despite the threats and attacks, Koinonia Farm survived, and in the late 1960’s Koinonia Farm changed its name and became Koinonia Partners. With Millard and Linda Fuller, who had once lived a month at Koinonia, Clarence Jordan and other Koinonia partners founded Koinonia Partnership Housing which later became Habitat for Humanity.

One of the most famous supporters of Koinonia and Habitat for Humanity is former President Jimmy Carter. Since 1984, he and his wife, Rosalynn, have helped build homes and raise funds for what has become an international non-profit organization with affiliates in New Richmond and around the world.

You can still buy hickory smoked pecans made in the original smokehouse built by Clarence Jordan at Koinonia Farm, but the wonderful fruitcakes are no longer listed in the online store. What I especially liked about those fruitcakes was the fact that they consisted primarily of nuts and fruits. When the ladies in our church stopped selling the fruitcake I liked, I was forced to bake my own. I found a recipe that is as good or even better than the ones we used to buy from Koinonia.

It is from Historic Cedarhurst Shares Favorite Recipes, a gift to Jerri from Mildred “Millie” Jorgensen many years ago. Millie gave our children their first piano lessons and Jay, her husband, kept the kids well fed with the cookies he baked. Though Cedarhurst is in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, the recipe was contributed by Edith Martell of Somerset, Wisconsin, so that makes it a local recipe and even more special to me.

If you like plenty of nuts and fruits in your fruitcake, you will probably like this one. I have been making it for many years, and it has a lot more fans than foes. The secret is to make it at least a month before you serve it so the flavors can meld and the rum can soften the nuts and fruits.

Cutting the dates and pineapple rings takes a little time, but you can have this cake in less than an hour.

INGREDIENTS:

4 cups walnut halves

1 1/2 cups pitted dates

1 1/2 cups whole candied red cherries

1 1/2 cups candied pineapple

1/2 to 3/4 cup candied orange peel

1 cup plus 2 T sifted flour

1 cup plus 2 T sugar

3/4 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

4 eggs

1 T vanilla extract

1 T rum flavoring

1/4 cup dark rum plus more for soaking

Cheesecloth and aluminum foil for wrapping

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 275º.

Cut the dates in half lengthwise and the pineapple rings into bite-sized pieces. Mix the fruit and nuts in a large bowl. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt over them and stir well.

Beat the eggs until lemon colored, then beat in the vanilla and rum extracts and the rum. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients until everything is moistened. Line a 9” x 13” baking pan with wax or parchment paper and grease it with butter. Scrape the batter into the pan and spread it evenly. Bake the cake on the lower rack of the oven at 275º for 1 1/2 hours.

Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool a few minutes. Put a sheet of wax paper on a flat surface. Remove the cake from the pan by tipping it upside down on the waxed paper. Let the cake cool another half hour or so, then carefully remove the paper from the cake. Cover the cake with wax paper and allow it to finish cooling.

When the cake is cold, cut it into eight pieces, wrap each piece with cheesecloth and soak each piece with rum by rolling the cheesecloth-wrapped pieces in a shallow bowl of rum. Wrap the pieces tightly in aluminum foil and store them at least a month in an airtight container before serving.

NOTES:  If you store the pieces longer than six months, you should open the foil and sprinkle each cake with more rum. Fruitcake keeps very well. You can enjoy last year’s cake while you are making the one for this Christmas.

Since Koinonia Farm was started by Baptist ministers, I’m pretty sure that their fruitcakes were not made with rum, but you need it for this recipe. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why this fruitcake is even better than theirs

Pasties Fit for a King

I don’t remember when or where I first ate a pasty. It might have been in Ironwood, Michigan, where some friends of my parents took us one time when they went to buy colored oleo. Stores in Wisconsin could not sell colored oleo at that time, so people would drive to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to buy cases of the nasty stuff.

Wherever it was, I did learn that pasties were called pass-tees, not paste-tees, an entirely different word that has nothing to do with meat pies. The fact intrigued me, so I began seeing pasties advertised in cities whenever we drove north in Wisconsin. Most of those small cafes that sold pasties are gone today, but you can still enjoy some pretty good pasties in the upper midwest.

Since pasties are commonly associated with the Cornish miners who settled near Mineral Point, Wisconsin and the mining areas of northeast Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, pasties are a traditional menu item in those areas. But the Finns also made similar meat pies and soon Finnish housewives were sending their husbands off to work with a pasty for lunch in the mines as well. There are still some great pasties made on the Iron Range in Minnesota by the granddaughters of those miners.

Pasties are actually a very old food and it is possible that they were first made in Cornwall. The name itself comes from the Latin word for paste, which was commonly used to mean a flour dough used to make pies.

One of the earliest references to pasties is by Chretien de Troyes who wrote Erec et Enide in 1170. According to him, a knight of the Round Table was offered a pasty in Cornwall while he was on one of his adventures. But Chretien was French, so he might have been thinking of the pasties he enjoyed for dinner at the court of his patroness, the Countess of Champagne.

As well they should be, pasties were considered an elegant dish for a long time. When George Neville was installed in 1465 as archbishop of York and chancellor of England, 5,500 venison pasties were served at the installation feast. A letter to King Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, reveals that the royal menu included pasties.

Though pasties became a workingman’s dish later on, I prefer to think that I like them because they really are a food fit for a king.

INGREDIENTS FOR THE FILLING:

1 beef bouillon cube
1/2 cup hot water
5 medium potatoes
2 medium carrots
1 medium onion (3 inches in diameter)
1 small rutabaga (3 inches in diameter)
1 1/2 lbs. beef
1 1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp. salt

INGREDIENTS FOR THE CRUST:

5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/4 cups shortening or lard
3/4 to 1 cup ice cold water

PROCEDURE:

First make the dough for the crust. Put a couple of ice cubes into a cup of water and allow the water to chill while you mix the dry ingredients.

Stir the salt into the flour in a large bowl and use two forks or a pastry blender to cut the shortening or lard into the flour until it looks like coarse cornmeal. Then sprinkle about a half cup of ice water over the flour. Use a fork to toss the dry ingredients and add more water in small amounts until all the flour is moistened and begins to clean the sides of the bowl. With a fork press the dough into a mound in the bowl, cover the bowl in plastic film and put it in the refrigerator while you prepare the filling.

This is a good time to preheat the oven to 400º and lightly grease enough baking sheets to hold eight pasties.

Dissolve a beef bouillon cube in a half cup of boiling water in a large bowl. Add the other ingredients to the bowl as you prepare them. Peel and finely dice five medium potatoes, which should give you about five cups. Peel and finely dice the carrots, onion and rutabaga. You should have between one half and one cup each of these vegetables.

Trim any excess fat from the beef and cut it into half inch pieces. Add the salt and pepper and mix everything together.

Take the chilled dough from the refrigerator and divide it into eight pieces. Form each piece into a ball. Roll the balls into circles about ten inches in diameter. Put about two cups of filling on one half of each circle, fold the other half over the top, moisten the edges, and seal the top crust to the bottom, rolling the edges up to form a rounded border that you can decorate with a fork or your fingers. Cut two or three small slits in the top crust and, using a baker’s scraper or large spatula, put the pasties on greased baking sheets.

Bake them for an hour until they are a golden brown. Let them cool covered with a dish towel for ten or fifteen minutes before serving. Make sure that the ketchup bottle is on the table. Jerri is from Kansas. She suggested that I should emphasize the ketchup more.

Pasties are a meal in themselves, but they go especially well with a good beer.

NOTES: You can freeze pasties and keep them for at least a couple of months. Reheat them in a conventional or microwave oven. Preheat a conventional oven to 375º. Put the frozen pasties on a baking sheet and bake them for thirty to forty minutes. Cut into a pasty to make sure that it is hot or use an instant read thermometer. The internal temperature should be 160º.