Crunchy Fruit Baskets and Fruit Cocktail Cake

First of all, tremendous thanks to Tarrant at Retro Food, for alerting us all to the fact that it was National Fruit Cocktail Day yesterday! I am not sure if we are celebrating this in Canada (which I plan to use as my excuse for not knowing this), but I would like to mark the occasion with a couple of recipes that pay cakey tribute to the wonder that is canned fruit cocktail. [I am a day late, I have just realized, and in fact today, the 14th, is National Buttermilk Biscuit Day - but no matter!]

The classic rendition is from The Hospitality Cookbook: Favorite Recipes From Ministers’ Wives (1960, reprinted 1969). And if Fruit Cocktail Cake is not hospitable, I just don’t know what is (I rephrased the end of the recipe, which was replete with remarks about how good this is the second day, etc.):

FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE

1 egg - beat in mixing bowl
1 medium sized (#2) can of fruit cocktail - pour juice and all into bowl with egg

Add to the above:

! cup each flour and sugar
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Stir together well. Pour into greased baking pan (or glass) about 8″ by 12″ size.

Mix together 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup nuts; sprinkle over top of cake. (You can use more brown sugar and nuts). Bake at 325 degrees about 45 minutes. Good warm with ice cream.

Ida Bailey Allen is a little more daring and artistic in her Money-Saving Cook Book (1947). She says to whip up a 3 egg sponge cake (I reckon any sponge cake or plain cake will work here) and bake it in 2 layers. Then put the layers together with any kind of jam.

“Then with a kitchen fork prick down through the cake on top 10 times to make small holes. Pour in 3/4 cup pineapple juice or use equal parts orange juice and Tokay wine. Chill at least one hour. Then decorate the top with sections of canned pineapple and cherries; or instead, make small insertions and in each stick half a blanched almond nut meat cut in halves lengthwise. To serve, place on a good-sized platter and surround with slightly sweetened, well-chilled fresh fruit cocktail.”

I don’t know about that last bit. it sounds potentially rather soggy.

Slashfood has an article on National Fruit Cocktail Day, too, and apparently the big name here is Libby’s - how fortuitous that I had a Libby’s ad in the previous post! But I would like to point out that Del Monte is also a big, big name in the Fruit Cocktail World, witness the above ad - which suggests another exciting idea for dessert, Crunchy Fruit Baskets. Something bothers me about it, I am not sure what. The name, possibly, or the resemblance to birds’ nests, or the implication that the canned fruit is going to be the high point of the meal.

Libby’s Tomato Juice Cans and the Women Who Love Them

You’re set, all right. For snack time at the loony bin! What is up with all that tomato juice? The woman is obsessed, and she’s passed the crazy on to the kid, too. They just love Libby’s tomato juice - to the exclusion, clearly, of all other groceries.

She and the kid are also dressed alike, in that strange 1950s me-and-my-doll kind of way. I’m surprised that there isn’t an identically dressed doll in the ad, too, clurching a teeny paper bag of individual-drink cans of Libby’s. Paging Betsy McCall!