Fruitcake she makes is in demand
Related Info
Mattie Clayton’s Fruitcake
Preheat oven to 250°. Cream butter and sugar. In separate bowls, separate egg whites from egg yolks. Combine the yolks with the butter and sugar mixture. Add 1 pound flour to butter and sugar mixture. Beat egg whites until they are stiff. Add egg whites to butter and sugar mixture. Meanwhile, in a large separate bowl, combine pecans, English walnuts, almonds, black walnuts, raisins, candied cherries and candied pineapple and ½ cup flour. Stir together. Pour butter and sugar batter over fruit and nuts and mix well. Line loaf pans or cake pans with greased brown paper, cut to the size of the pans. Fill pans three-quarters full with batter. Bake for 1 hour at 250°, then raise temperature to 275° and cook for an additional hour. After removing cakes from oven, pour small amount of rum over them. Let cakes sit overnight. The next day, wrap them in wine cloth and then in aluminum foil and then seal them in plastic bags.
Makes 12 pounds of fruitcakeSLIDESHOW: Fruitcake
Fruitcake, as we all know, has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to holiday food.
"If you want to get even with a person," said Mattie Clayton with a laugh, expressing a common line of thinking, "give them a fruitcake."
But she's not talking about her fruitcakes. She uses those for genuine gifts, not retribution.
Clayton is something of an authority on fruitcake, based on experience. She's been making them for more than 50 years, and when she makes them, she really makes them.
More than 300 every Christmas season.
That, friends, is a lot of candied cherries.
It's also worth noting that on her last birthday she turned 90 and that she often works five days a week in the kitchen at County Seat, her daughter Janie Dean's popular restaurant in Powhatan County.
"They laugh because . . . they think I should stay at the house in a rocking chair and do nothing," said Clayton, who moved to Powhatan more than 60 years ago, raised five children and worked many years at Huguenot Academy, where she drove a bus and managed the cafeteria. "But I enjoy meeting people, and I'm real proud of my fruitcakes."
She's also proud of the cakes, cobblers, soups and potato salad she makes for customers, but it's December, so her focus is on fruitcakes.
Clayton didn't much like fruitcake when she first tried it many years ago, because fruitcake wasn't something she was familiar with growing up in a family of nine children on a farm in Brunswick County. It was just, well, different.
But then she saw a recipe for fruitcake in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and gave it a try. She didn't use some of the traditional fruitcake ingredients, such as nutmeg, cinnamon and citrus peelings, and found she actually liked the way it tasted. The rum poured over the top of the cake after it's baked also doesn't hurt.
Best she can recall, she started making fruitcakes in the 1950s and hasn't stopped.
Clayton makes at least 12 pounds at a time, baking them in small loaf pans or in big, round tube pans. She has discovered that most people prefer the small loaves, a pound of fruitcake being just about the right amount to last a season. She bakes them in her own kitchen and in the kitchen at County Seat, where she sells many of them for $10 a pound. She gives many as Christmas presents.
"I don't have any trouble getting rid of them," she said.
Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or
.
Advertisement
Advertisement