Make the season bright with Reindeer Knoll - a joyful guide to Christmas traditions, history, activities, and songs. Discover the origins of beloved Christmas customs like decorating trees, Santa Claus, and gift-giving. Learn fun holiday activities like baking cookies, building snowmen, and Christmas crafts. Sing along to classic Christmas carols and songs the whole family will love.
The earliest recipe from ancient Rome lists pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins that were mixed into barley mash. In the Middle Ages, honey, spices, and preserved fruits were added. In medieval times, European crusaders would carry their version of Christian fruitcakes made with bread, honey, spices, dried fruit, and mead with them on their six-month treks to sack the Holy Land.
Fruitcakes soon proliferated all over Europe. Recipes varied greatly in different countries throughout the ages, depending on the available ingredients as well as church regulations forbidding the use of butter, regarding the observance of Fasting. Pope Innocent VIII finally granted the use of butter, in a written permission known as the ‘Butter Letter' or Butterbrief in 1490, giving permission to Saxony to use milk and butter in the Stollen fruitcakes.
Starting in the 16th century, sugar from the American Colonies (and the discovery that high concentrations of sugar could preserve fruits) created an excess of candied fruit, thus making fruitcakes more affordable and popular. The 17th-century English fruitcake was originally yeast-leavened, and the rum and dried fruit helped extend the shelf life of the cake.