100-year old fruit cake found in Antarctica's oldest building
nzaht.org
nzaht.org
Fruit cake is literally one of my favorite foods, and I don't really feel like I have esoteric taste in the general case.
(don't get me started on how limited British bakeries are - the only saving grace is a slow increase in French and Eastern European patisseries)
There are some very sweet Scandinavian pastry, but I don't think they're particularly prevalent, and frankly many of the sweetest ones - including the Danish itself - are not of Scandinavian origin. What is today considered a Danish came in an earlier form from Austria; in Scandinavia they are known - with some spelling variations - as wienerbrød; literally "bread from Vienna" though the modern Danish is an adaptation more than straight "theft". Puff pastry in general is not typical of Scandinavian pastry, but probably arrived with the Austrian bakers that brought the basis for wienerbrød/Danish
And I guess the sweetness is probably the reason - more need for conservation. A lot of older Scandinavian baked goods are dry and can last for years in some cases, but the creamier ones may very well largely be new enough for many of them to have come at a time when at least the wealthier people who could afford them would have started having at least ice boxes to refrigerate foodstuffs.
I mean they may not be Danish, but that's what they're called colloquially. I tend to find French pastries the best as I don't find them too sweet.
How do you think your patisserie's finest extensive use of cremes cake would look after 100 years in a hut?
I guess it comes down to where you grew up and what you are used to...
There are a variety of traditional puddings and mousses, usually served with a contrasting sauce. That's the closest you might get to a "bowl of cream" that I can think of. There's also a variety of porridge types but they are usually served as the main meal, not dessert.
All of these might be served without anything on, but you're rarely meant to eat them that way unless it's a mousse with a particularly distinct flavor or texture (e.g. a chocolate mousse might be served without a sauce, but you'd not generally do that with a caramel pudding or almond pudding)
Then again most of these are not served often apart from Christmas, where rice porridge and puddings are a tradition, or as a treat for children.
When it comes to finding non-British bakeries "limiting" the only thing I could think of would be savoury pastries, as that is a weird British obsession and the selection will generally be very small most other places. To me that doesn't belong anywhere, but certainly not at a bakery. At a butchers or a 7-11 or similar comfort-food store, maybe, but not at a bakery..
Apart from that I can't think of any category of baked goods I've found an adequate selection of in a British-style bakery. In actual French-owned bakeries or patisseries (like e.g. PAUL) sure, but most French-sounding bakeries in the UK are British bakeries. E.g Cuisine de France / Delice de France brands are owned by Aryzta Food Solutions of Southall, Middlesex...
And this is the cake selection of a relatively fancy British bakery (Peyton and Byrne), to illustrate my original issue of overly fruity selections:
Berries: Swiss Roll (though this can also be made with cream fillings, it's usually jam in the UK), Victoria Sponge, Bakewell Tart
Fruity: Jaffa Cake, Lemon Drizzle Loaf, Banana Loaf, Elderflower Layer Cake, Banoffee, Lemon Meringe
Non-Fruity/berry: Chocolate & Caramel Explosion (possibly, I would not be surprised to see berries on that in the UK), Carrot Cake, Coffee & Walnut (not a certainty...), Treacle Tart, Chocolate & Salted Caramel
So that is 4 out of 13 where fruit or berries are not a substantial element.
This is in my experience a substantially above average selection terms of avoiding fruit/berry dominated pastry. And I've nice and not put the treacle tart in the fruit category (since it's generally more zesty than overly sweetened lemon.
Here's an example of what I expect a decent selection of cakes to look like at a bakery:
https://samson.no/sortiment/konditorvarer https://samson.no/sortiment/sot-bakst
I have excluded their large cakes and only included the ones suitable to eat in (though most will have a selection of slices from their larger cakes available to eat in at times as well).
Of those the following have fruit or berries: Rosinbolle (raisins), Scones Grov (raisins), Skolebrød (drizzled coconut shavings on top), Eplemuffins (apples), Jacob (raisins), Friand (raspberries), Sitronterte (lemons), Jordbærterte (strawberries), Sitronkake (lemons)
That is 14 out of 26, of which most will not be particularly sweetened by the fruit, as unlike the British selection most of them are small amounts rather than filling, and pieces of fresh fruit rather than jam or similar high-sugar. I would say that would apply to about half of the above.
Note, I am not against using berries and to a (much lesser extent) fruit in pastry, but the dominance of it in UK pastries annoys me. In the selection above you see, on top of a similar selection of different fruits and berries, pastries with fillings based on almonds (macaron style fillings), rum, egg cream, chocolate, vanilla cream, cinnamon, several of them in several distinct variations.
Also there are several types of 'porridge' for which the primary ingredient is cream but yeah they are served as a main meal rather than a dessert.
As I say this really does come down to personal preference which is largely shaped by where you grew up.
Great for arctic and antarctic expeditions, but not so much for sitting on bums in front of screens.
Luckily, 18th Century recipes had a lot less sugar than modern recipes, and so I'm staying under my calorie goals for the day even when I have pudding.
Jokes about fruit cakes used to be common. I fear the jokes were too successful and killed off the fruit cake.
I love fruit cake. I wish someone would give me a fruit cake as a gift they way we used to get them when I was a kid.
Don't you see them at every wedding?
https://usercontent2.hubstatic.com/7576569_f520.jpg
You keep a slice for the first christening.
Specifically, of a fruitcake is destroyed another one is created, and vice versa. This also means that the universe was created with a fixed number of fruitcakes...
They did the same with a crate of whiskey they found a couple of years ago. https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons-whisky
"A traveller can go for miles, just knowing there's dwarf bread in their pack. A traveller can think of just about anything to eat rather than dwarf bread including their own foot and even pumpkins"
“Dwarf bread?” said Rincewind.
“Too right! That’s what kept us going across thousands of miles of shark-infested ocean,” said Mad. “If we hadn’t had that sack of dwarf bread we’d—”
“—never have been able to club the sharks to death?” said Rincewind.
“Ah, you’re a man who knows your breads.”
The molecules that make up living things (e.g. corn or Spam) are stable at the temperatures at which those things live. If you remove the bacteria that primarily breaks things down there's not going to be much change.
It's no different than a house with 200yo timbers.
Of course, she might just have wanted to tell a story to get us interested in her lesson on Christmas traditions.
Second meaning
Also there was a British (I think) outpost that had canned food on the shelves from the late 1950s, was a bit surreal.
Edit: Ashens cake from 1 year later, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2zXt6irnOg.
Metal and wooden crates/boxes did the same job then as cardboard boxes do now.
I've had to maintain some of those.
Removing the parameters in the url gives a descriptive error page. (Error from Index+ Web Server (hixclient.exe)
I've found many museum sites running this.
I'm starting to have flashbacks to the various C web CGI applications that I used to develop and maintain now... Awful is not the descriptor that I'd have used. These things were abominations, more so by todays "standards." I don't remember all of the details, but I do distinctly remember that user input was an absolute nightmare to deal with, as well as sending/receiving files.
Another nightmarish memory from those days: I once had a co-worker develop the backend to a web CGI in bash (!) and, before I knew he had done it, he was kicking it over the wall for me to finish. I ended up demonstrating why this would cause poor performance and then re-wrote it as C. Yikes. I'm really glad that we've moved beyond all of... that.
I did that once with Fortran 77 on Linux back in the 90's, but just as a joke. IIRC, there were some issues, like you could never suppress all of the console output it produced or something. In general, though, I think it's good to still have a lowbrow CGI option if you just want to throw something together.