Reviving tradition: Can dried fruit regain its sweet spot in modern palates?
Christmas in Mumbai is when you see nuns buying dried fruit at Crawford Market. Like many other Christmas cake bakers, they clearly believe that the best-dried fruit, in quality and value, is still found among the vendors here.
Dried fruit is intrinsic to Christmas, whether in cake, pudding or mince pies, where ‘mince’ means chopped-up dried fruit.
In December 1927, The Times of India published a long article by E Edwards, first-class diploma in cookery, King’s College for Women, which explained in detail how to choose and prepare dried fruit — Valencia raisins, Australian sultanas and currants, candied peel — for Christmas: “It is worthwhile to use fruit of the first quality, as this naturally gives the most satisfactory results.”
But a recent survey by Ocado, a British online grocery business, found that one in five respondents who bought Christmas cake admitted that they didn’t like it, and that 50 per cent preferred chocolate cake. In the
US, fruitcake, which is also made with dried fruit, has been out of fashion since the 1980s when humourists
like Russell Baker and Johnny Carson started joking about fruitcakes that were never eaten, but just passed generation to generation.
Dried fruit has always been a pricey luxury in India, seen as full of healthy properties which is why it was fed to students studying for exams.
A less wholesome connection was explained in a ToI article on Mumbai’s dance bar
culture, which explained how one way in which dancers toyed with their devotees was to go with them to Haji Ali Juice Centre and make them order the most expensive dried fruit milkshakes, and “then they pack a glass or two for their mothers and friends”.
But even here, I suspect dried fruit is falling out of favour. In
