Fruitcake has long been a part of British celebrations

New Statesman​

30-04-2025

A journalist contacted me recently, wanting to know what I thought about a campaign to add cask ale to Unesco's list for Intangible Cultural Heritage. Along with most Brits, I suspect, I had no idea such a list existed. Britain only last year ratified the convention, which attempts to safeguard significant traditions. Culinary entries include Belgian beer, Singaporean hawker cuisine, the French gastronomic meal, and couscous from the Maghreb.
While applauding the campaigners, in the end I concluded that there were British food traditions just as ancient and precious as cask beer, but a tiny bit more – how can I put this – universal? Women have brewed beer in the home and the farmhouse for centuries, but they were edged out of commercial brewing in the medieval period. Although the hospitality industry today can be magnificently welcoming, historically inns and taverns haven't been particularly friendly to women. (Food historians hold long grudges.) There are more universally produced and consumed foodstuffs. My top contender for Unesco's list would be fruitcake, closely followed by cheese.
Perhaps I just have the blessing of fruitcake, with its curranty explosions, citrussy backchat and toffeeish depth on my mind at the moment. As women have for centuries before me, I am making what used to be called a 'bride cake' for my forthcoming wedding.
Fruitcake has been at the heart of every British celebration for as long as cooks have had 'plums' – dried fruit – and sugar. ('Plum' in the context of cake means something desirable, as in 'a plum job' – not the fresh fruit. Asking his mother to send him something to help curry favour at boarding school, Vanity Fair's George Sedley Osborne specifies: 'Please not a seed-cake, but a plum-cake.') For holy and festival days, bakers added dried fruits and warm spices to bread, which used 'barm' or ale-yeast, created in the brewing process, to help them rise. The novelist Flora Thompson described how, to make 'harvest cakes', the late-Victorian Oxfordshire housewives gave a basin of 'raisins and currants, lard, sugar and spice' to the baker, who added dough and returned it 'beautifully browned… and delicious'. Some barmbracks and bara briths (and buns of the hot, cross variety, of course) are still made with yeast. Most, however, following the discovery of some culinary genius, now use the magic of beaten eggs to lighten flour, sugar and butter.
Fruitcake maps on to a peculiarly British geography. 'Every country town, village and rural neighbourhood in England, Scotland and Ireland has its favourite holiday cake, or currant loaf… the formula is endless – and they are all good,' praised the Scottish writer Christian Isobel Johnstone (under the pseudonym Margaret Dods) in 1826. Fruitcakes are accommodating about time and date as well as place. The Twelfth Night cake shuffled back a few days to Christmas, when that took over as the major celebration in the 19th century. The simnel cake and its 11 little marzipan balls (and, if you are lucky, a layer of marzipan baked into the centre) does for both Easter and Mothering Sunday. There is munificence in a fruitcake; it will go round a sizeable family, a gang of harvest workers, or any number of guests. It has extraordinary staying power; every so often a story pops up about the sale at auction of a slice of Queen Victoria's wedding cake from 1840 – still identifiable, if not exactly appetising.
I would happily offer an olive branch to the beer campaigners by suggesting we add to Unesco's list the northern triumvirate: fruitcake with a wedge of tangy cheese and a dark, heady ale. However, it looks as if any UK campaign to get something on to the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage would be fruitless. Although we have ratified the convention, celebrating specific items or customs from the UK is, in the opinion of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 'neither desirable or beneficial'. Which might be why Britain is better known for Yes, Minister and other political satires than for our culinary traditions.
Pen Vogler is the author of 'Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain' (Atlantic)
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