It's officially the Christmas season at my house. There's a fruitcake and a mincemeat pie in the kitchen. There are tamales, pecans and lots of grapefruit. I'm a traditionalist in late December. All that's missing is one of those Helena oyster loaves that Richard Allin once wrote about in the Arkansas Gazette.
When I was a boy, my parents would order fruitcakes each December from the Collin Street Bakery at Corsicana, Texas. Go ahead and tell your fruitcake jokes, but I keep the family tradition going. The recipe for this fruitcake was brought to Texas from Wiesbaden, Germany, by a baker named Gus Weidmann in 1896. Weidmann and a business partner, Tom McElwee, built a bakery in Corsicana. The Collin Street Bakery website tells their story this way: "The shy, perfectionist Gus Weidmann ran his little kitchen in this newly formed Collin Street Bakery and made ready for the busy Christmas seasons. At the same time, Tom McElwee was sending out letters, making sales trips and lining up an ever-growing list of bakery customers. They made a nice team and enjoyed such success that their once anonymous Texas fruitcake and pecan cake became a delicacy to be sought after by folks from every corner of the globe."
With all due respect to the sales ability of McElwee, John Ringling must get part of the credit for making Corsicana fruitcakes popular across the country. The proceeds from his circus placed him among the country's richest men. By 1925, Ringling's wealth was estimated at $200 million. He loved the Collin Street Bakery fruitcakes and had them shipped around the world. The bakery filled its cakes with native Texas pecans, leading to the term "nutty as a fruitcake," coined in the 1930s.
As for mincemeat pie, it was my father's favorite. Though I'm the only one in the family who eats mincemeat, I must have one or it just doesn't seem like Christmas. My wife, a south Texas native, had never heard of mincemeat until she met me. We have tamales in honor of her roots (and because I like them). Mincemeat was created as a way of preserving meat. It became a Christmas staple in parts of Europe when the Crusaders returned home with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. By the 20th century, the meat had been replaced in most instances by spiced fruits such as apples, candied citrus and raisins. King Henry V of England reportedly served mincemeat at his coronation in 1413. Oliver Cromwell considered Christmas a pagan holiday, and traditional mincemeat pie was banned for a time. King Charles II restored Christmas as a holiday when he ascended the throne in 1660, and mincemeat pie returned to England. It remains popular in former parts of the British Empire such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
As for the pecans and grapefruit, there always were plenty of both in the house when I was a child. Half a grapefruit for breakfast and handfuls of roasted pecans during the day meant it was December. I can remember my grandfather in Des Arc spending hours at a time at his kitchen table shelling pecans.
Allin, who died in October 2007 at age 77, wrote the "Our Town" column for the Gazette and later the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In a 1978 book, Helena: The Ridge, The River, The Romance, he wrote a chapter on Christmas in Helena. "One of the surest signs of the approach of Christmas at my house in Helena was when my mother began muttering, more or less to herself, something about pecans," Allin said. "About a month before Christmas, one of the chairs at the kitchen table would be pre-empted for a time by a huge brown paper sack containing always 10 pounds of pecans still in the shell. Times were dangerous in the kitchen during the next week or so. The air was filled with shards of pecan shrapnel that whizzed around the room every time the lever on the pecan cracker was pulled. ... My mother greeted each pecan as a new challenge to be attacked with unwavering ferocity. Shucking 10 pounds of pecans is no mean task."
It's the oyster loaf that I've never experienced. Allin's recipe called for slicing the top from what he described as a "long Pullman loaf" of bread, hollowing it out, brushing it with melted butter, toasting it and then filling the loaf with fried oysters, lemon wedges, olives, ketchup and mustard pickles. Allin noted that mustard pickles had become hard to find. The recipe consists of cucumbers and onions pickled in a mustard sauce along with turmeric and celery seed.
"The tradition of eating the oyster loaf on Christmas Eve got started, in my family at least, many years ago when my grandfather would stop by an old Helena restaurant-delicatessen and pick up a couple of these specialties," Allin wrote. "In those days, that particular restaurant made its own bread, a type of which was the long pullman loaf, named, I suppose, because it had the same dimensions as the railroad car. By the time I was invited into the family, it had become the practice to make the oyster loaf at home, although still using the restaurant's singular bread. ... The tradition of the oyster loaf perhaps came up the river from New Orleans. ... A chilled white wine goes well. So does beer. This is a Christmas Eve dish. If you eat it at any other time, you do so at your own risk."
I'm always drawn to these six words written by Allin: "So many good traditions have passed." I'm a traditionalist at Christmas. That's why there's a fruitcake, a mincemeat pie, tamales, pecans and grapefruit at our house.
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate community relations for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 12/21/2016