Is Fruit Cake just for the holidays?

 

I received an email a number of weeks back, asking if I would be interested in writing a follow-up blog about fruit cake. Back in 2013, I had written a post about the history of Fruit cake, and what I felt might be some good wine pairings. That post was seen by the owners of Jane Parker Fruit Cakes. They offered to send me a fruit cake if I would write an honest opinion of their cakes and share some pairing ideas. A few weeks later, I received a fruit cake in the mail, along with a few small sample packs. This got the ideas flowing, the following is the results of those ideas.

First, let me say that I am one of those that appreciates good fruit cake. The Jane Parker Classic light fruit cake I received was dense, moist, and packed with raisins glace cherries, glace pineapple, and topped with pecans. There was a large ratio of fruit to cake. This wasn’t an overly spiced cake. I would say it had a slight amount of nutmeg.

 In an effort to be unbiased in my review of the Jane Parker fruit cake, I invited four couples to join my wife and me for a Charcuterie platter and numerous wines. The idea was to let everyone experiment with different meats, cheeses and wines, then formulate their own opinion on what works. I also wanted to break the stereotype of fruit cake only being for the holidays (so why not add it to a charcuterie plate?). I sliced half of the fruit cake and added it to my charcuterie plate. We had about a dozen wines to try, and everyone had numerous wine glasses, to try multiple pairings at a time.

The wines I included, were based on my suggestions from my previous blog about fruit cake. They included: German Spatlese Riesling, Alsace Gewurztraminer, Dry Rose Sparkling wine, Beaujolais from Brouilly (gamay), Italian Dolcetto, Lodi Old Vine Zinfandel (very “jammy”), French Muscat de St Jean, and Tawny Port. Our guests brought some additional wines and a Lambic beer: German Liebfraumilch, California Grenache, and Framboise Lambic, plus additional Rieslings from California and Germany.

 The Charcuterie plate included: 4 cheeses (Wensleydale, Ridder, Smokin Goat, and Mascarpone), 3 meats (Iberico ham, Sweet Sopressata, and Genoa Salami). For our vegetarian guests, I included vegan pepperoni, vegan smoked chorizo, and a tomato & basil Pâté. We also had four different types of crackers and cheese sticks, dried and fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, quince paste, fig jam, apple calvados jam, cheese stuffed sweet peppers, as well as mustard and aioli.

Out of the ten people attending the tasting, three of us had food industry backgrounds, and three admitted to not really liking fruit cake, and shared the typical jokes about fruit cake. By the end of the night, everyone agreed that the Jane Parker fruit cake was very good, and agreed that it can be a versatile addition to any gathering, if paired properly. Two comments at the end of the night were, “send more cake, we need to do more experimentation” and “this made a fruit cake believer out of me!”

So, what worked?

I had originally planned the charcuterie plate with items I thought would work with the fruit cake. The sweetness of the cake should work with salty, so the Iberico ham, and Wensleydale cheese were expected to work….and they did. But it was the items that were unexpected that really got everyone exploring. The surprise of the night was fruit cake paired with the sweet sopressata (sweet vs salty) and probably the best pairing of the night was fruit cake with Ridder cheese and German Riesling (everything just came together on this one). I had thought the tomato and basil pate might work with the fruit cake, and it should have, but the pate needed more salt. In hindsight, I could have added some finishing salt to the pate. The Iberico ham worked perfectly with the fruit cake, and even better when a slight spread of mascarpone cheese was added.

At the very end, I served the Jane Parker fruit cake by itself, and we tried some wine pairings. We found some that were very good. Riesling was the all-around favorite, but Moscato, Liebfraumilch and the Framboise Lambic beer were also excellent pairings. The Gewurztraminer was interesting, as it pulled out the nutmeg flavors in the fruit cake. The Old Vine Zinfandel had just enough fruitiness to work with the cherries and raisins in the fruit cake. Two wines that didn’t work at all with the fruit cake were the Sparkling Rose and the Tawny Port (maybe with a darker style, or chocolate fruit cake). When serving sweet items, always try to keep our beverage slightly sweeter.

 

Lastly, we discussed other ideas for using fruit cake during the year (and not just the holidays). Ideas included toasted fruit cake with cream cheese, deep fried fruit cake, and my personal favorite is to use it as a stuffing, by cutting it into chunks to be added to a stuffing/side dish for Pork or Duck.

My unbiased opinion...Jane Parker makes a really nice fruit cake that reminds me of cakes I had as a kid. Fruit cake can be incorporated into a dinner party, wine tasting, or any event, as long as you include items that will pair with the sweetness of the fruit cake.

It was a fun experiment, and one of our guests texted me the next morning saying. “We can’t stop remarking how much we enjoyed last night! Thank you so much for a remarkable evening”. Mission complete!

Now we need to try this again with other Jane Parker cakes.

Charcuterie

I often get e-mails or phone calls from friends and blog followers, asking for advice on wine choices, or whether I have tried a certain wine that is being sold for a low price on one of those bargain wine websites. This week, I got a notice on my cellphone, as a Facebook notice, that I had been tagged in a comment from one of my friends. The message read, “Charcuterie.... Missing Madrid... Jim Newcomb.... Where are you when we need you? I can't decide Wine Flight".

Well, I don’t know what the wine flight choices were, but I can certainly make some recommendations. 

The first course of action is to understand what “charcuterie” is. Then we can use that information to determine what types of wines would work best.

Charcuterie is basically cured meat. This meat can be salted, smoked, or brined. The word is French, but its’ origins come from the Latin for “caro” or meat, and “coctus”, or cooked.  Prior to the advent of refrigeration, the idea was to preserve the stock of meat over the course of many months. Until the use of nitrates for preservation, salt was the preservative of choice.

The meat is usually pork, but can be made from any type of protein (seafood, poultry, beef, or game meats). The most common type of charcuterie is “forcemeat”. Forcemeat is a mixture of ground meat and fat, along with a variety of spices.  The meat can be coarse, or pureed into a smooth emulsion. The most common forcemeats are salami (brined, salted or dry cured) or sausages (raw meat in casings that need to be cooked, usually by boiling, grilling or smoking).

Another style of charcuterie is “mousseline”. In this style the meat is much lighter in texture, and made from leaner cuts of meat. The meat is usually blended with cream or eggs, adding to the mousse-like texture of the final product. The most common would be Pâté and terrines. Pâté is considered the finer textured of the two, and usually is made from liver.

There are many types of charcuterie, and this article is not meant to cover each style or production process. A basic understanding of what charcuterie generally is, helps us to determine what the best style of wines might be for pairing. There are a couple things that we find in common for charcuterie: salt, and fat. The additional variable is the curing process, spices used, proteins used, and the curing process involved.

Let’s look at salt first. Salty foods need a wine that can contrast, or counteract the saltiness. This is accomplished with sweet, acidic, or sparkling wines. The salter the charcuterie, the sweeter the wine need to be. Now, to be clear, we aren’t looking to pair a dessert wine with our salami, all we need is a touch of residual sugar in the wine. In this case, the most likely candidates would be Riesling for white, and Beaujolais (Gamay) for red.

Our second common component is fat. Fat will coat your mouth, so we need something that will cleanse the palate. This can be accomplished either with a sparkling wine, or an acidic wine. I find that most sparkling wines have a tough time holding up to some of the “heavier” flavors of pork or beef based charcuterie,  so usually avoid the sparkling route (but it can be very nice with lighter pâtés and terrines). The choice to cover the most bases would be higher acid grape varieties. In this case, our previous two choices of Beaujolais and Riesling would work, but we can add a couple more choices: Chenin Blanc and Barbera. We now have four wine choices that would work with most any type of charcuterie. Add some spicy components to the charcuterie, and you might also consider Gewurztraminer, or even a blend from Cotes du Rhone.

These are by no means the only wine choices. If you know your wine varieties, and their general profile, you can experiment in good faith. Also remember that local wines, usually work with the local products. So, try to determine where the style of charcuterie was developed, then look for wines from that region that might fit the bill. But most of all, don’t worry about it. Experiment, and have fun!