Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that fits perfectly in your stocking, right next to that moldy orange.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are Shea,

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that the moral of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is that no one likes you unless you’re useful.

I'm Steve, and I’m back baby!

Stuffed To The Stockings

I spent this last weekend making a few hundred cookies—also, team, I hope you like cookies cause that’s what you’re getting—and while Googling cookie recipes I also found… this stuff.

So, for a very 2020-appropriate holiday special, I bring you the worst things people might try to feed you on the longest night of the year…

Of course there are the staples like Fruitcake, which I think, might actually include staples.

This dense, flavorless, unforgiving calorie-brick only rears its ugly head on the holiday’s, a time when you’re supposed to show people that… you know… you like them. Still, the world is full of poor, missguided souls who think their friends and family actually want a savory cake so densely filled with canned fruit-cocktail rejects, ex-grapes, and bad liquor that they bend light and reason into their gravity well of terribleness.

The fruitcake tradition goes back to ancient Rome when people would make oat and barley cakes, just to make sure it was extra terrible I guess, and mix in pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins. Though, they could be forgiven because literally anything except dying of yee-oldie rot was the best thing in the world. Foruntantly, as a people we’ve… mostly figured out how to stop making everything a test of one’s mettle.

Unless you live in Australia that is, because in the land of literally-everything-is-trying-to-kill-you of course they consider fruitcake a year-round treat. I guess it is better than dying of dropbear STDs.

In Ireland the fruitcake will actually try to kill you. Apparently, it’s traditional to bake barmbrack on Hallowe’en with coins, rings, and other small choking hazards.

Ah shelf stable, open-air, bread. What could be better?

Booze.

It would seem that most fruitcake recipes and variations work in a great deal of alcohol. Usually the “fruit” is soaked for weeks before being used but in variations like those in the Anglophone Caribbean booze is an important ingredient because you’re trying to make, essentially, a very drunken English Christmas pudding log. Some recipes call for so much alcohol, and for the cake to be wrapped in an alcohol soaked cloth, that they’ll last more or less forever. For example, the Ford family in Tecumseh, Michigan considers the fruitcake their great, great, I-lost-count, great grandpa made in 1878 an family heirloom. They even got Jay Leno to eat a bit on air and he didn’t die, so that’s nice. The oldest consumable fruitcake on record is the 109-year-old cake discovered in 2017 by the Antarctic Heritage Trust.

And now that we’ve go to the obligatory “fruitcakes are terrible” story out of the way, let’s put something inside a seal.

Yep, as in a water-puppy.

This is Kiviak—or as it’s more commonly known, Satan’s Turkduken—is a traditional dish from Greenland. Apparently, Inuits needed a source of vitamins, minerals, and stank during the deep winter months so they did the only logical thing, they hollowed out a seal—their phrase, not mine—and filled up the seal-sack with four or five hundred dead Auk birds, beaks, feathers, feet and all. Auk birds are those tink, penguin-crossed-with-a-house-sparrow looking birds. They’re related to puffins and weigh in at 5 to 6 ounces, so you can fit a lot of them inside 500 pounds of dead seal. Once stuffed the seal-ducken is left to ferment under a rock for around three months.