Fruitcake and Spam

Everyone buys fruitcake and gives it as gifts at Christmas. Some people spend hours in the kitchen making fruitcake from scratch and give it as gifts at Christmas. That became known to me only recently when I saw a recipe for fruitcake on the Internet, which is one of the downfalls of the Internet. I had nightmares for weeks. Anyway, nobody eats fruitcake. Some people drill it to attach a chain and use it as a boat anchor, but nobody eats it.

One guy that I read regularly posted his own family recipe for fruitcake. I’m still shuddering. He says that he has some that was made ten years ago and is “still delicious.” I have no trouble believing that it is still as delicious as it was ten years ago, but that’s not necessarily saying much.

Other than in Hawaii, nobody eats Spam, either. People make jokes about it, and Hormel has a recipe contest for it every year, but the recipes are bogus because nobody ever eats it outside of one state.

And the US Navy Submarine Service. Or at least they did fifty years ago, much to the loudly vocalized disgust of the crew. We had fresh stores for about three weeks at sea, and then it was what was called “sea stores,” and the meat was bologna and Spam. For some reason, bologna was fairly well accepted, but Spam was a different story. We only had one cook, since diesel boats are pretty small ships, and he took a great deal of abuse every time he served Spam.

As did I, because I liked Spam, and still do. When Spam was on the table I would declaim, “Oh good, Spam for dinner,” which would be met with catcalls and cries of, “Kill that moron.” Fortunately, the ship was always short of electricians, so killing that moron wasn’t feasible.

I still like Spam, but not fruitcake.