100-year old fruit cake found in Antarctica's oldest building

Amusing that the cake was in excellent condition, while the metal box it was stored in was partly decomposed. Once again, reality has one-upped all the jokes.

lawless123• 9 years ago

Even the microbes don't want it.

ncr100• 9 years ago

"100 year old fruit cake tastes just like new fruit cake." /s

aunty_helen• 9 years ago

The weirdest part about all this is that they have to keep it frozen the whole time and then at the end of it all fly it back down to Antarctica, trek it out to the hut and then leave it there.

They did the same with a crate of whiskey they found a couple of years ago. https://www.nzaht.org/pages/shackletons-whisky

gideonparanoid• 9 years ago

My girlfriend has done some work in Antarctica before, she said that it wasn't uncommon to find food ten or twenty years past its use-by-date. This is kind of the next level though.

pbhjpbhj3• 9 years ago

We found 30+ year expired food in my mother's pantry not long ago. I doubt that's particularly rare in the West.

dsfyu404ed2• 9 years ago

If it's pasteurized, sealed in a can and stored at room temperature there's not much to make it go bad.

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.

nkrisc• 9 years ago

Not quite food, but we found a bottle of Bailey's in my grandmother's basement that was maybe 20-30 years old. It had turned into Bailey's cheese.

scruple2• 9 years ago

When my grandfather passed, we found beer from the 50s and 60s (we guessed at the ages based on the designs -- it was stamped with local sports team memorabilia). We kept some of the Pittsburgh-sports team ones, in fact, and they're at my parents home on display with the rest of my fathers sports memorabilia. I also remember finding very old unopened soda bottles, though I am not sure what happened to those. Point being, I agree with you that it's probably not as rare as one might think on a first pass.

dlhavema• 9 years ago

When i cleaned out an apartment in 2003 i found a pickle jar that didnt have nutrition information included in the still fully readable label. Those have been required in the US for decades...

retox• 9 years ago

Cake, instant. Type two. Nice.

https://youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA

parshimers• 9 years ago

"Nice hiss." They really should mail it to him considering it smelled OK. I think he'd try eating a bit of it. I doubt it'd be the worst thing he's tried on that channel, even if the nuts are a bit rancid.

arethuza2• 9 years ago

It does rather remind me of the cakes that seemed to be popular in the UK in my youth (1970s) that only seemed to be given as presents - nobody ever seemed to eat them.

theBobBob• 9 years ago

I wonder how many of them were regifted and just passed around for ages.

vidarh7• 9 years ago

One of my teachers told me of a supposed incident where one of her friends allegedly got the same cake back a year later from a different person than she'd given it to - it was an unusual shape or something.

Of course, she might just have wanted to tell a story to get us interested in her lesson on Christmas traditions.

arethuza2• 9 years ago

I think they were passed around until someone needed a wedding cake and then they were covered in marzipan and Chobham armour like icing. These were cut up and sent to people to say thanks for giving wedding presents - I can remember eating the marzipan but never the cake or the impenetrable icing.

grondilu• 9 years ago

It looks better than some of the stuff in my fridge.

throwanem3• 9 years ago

Still every bit as edible as the day it was forged, I'm sure. Those things are terrifying. But apparently they make very durable emergency rations! On the one hand, they can last a century, and on the other, you can be sure no one will molest them absent desperate necessity.

AaronM2• 9 years ago

Much like dwarven bread in Discworld?

"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"

throwanem3• 9 years ago

Very much like. I want to say I recall somewhere seeing an interview or similar in which Pratchett mentioned fruitcake as an inspiration for his dwarf bread, but I can't find a cite for that, so may misremember.

ypxz• 9 years ago

“So we settled down, and now my dad’s got a chain of bakeries in Bugarup.”

“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.”

vidarh7• 9 years ago

"Forged" is clearly the right word.

throwanem3• 9 years ago

It was either that or "stamped".

michelb2• 9 years ago

Just as well-conserved as the Huntley & Palmers website: http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk/ixbin/hixclient.exe?a=fi...

zerr• 9 years ago

I wonder what's that hixclient.exe

GFischer• 9 years ago

Probably some awful CGI VB6 or C app.

I've had to maintain some of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

warvair• 9 years ago

Amazing that after all this time it remains inedible.

SwellJoe3• 9 years ago

I don't understand why everyone doesn't love fruit cake. Maybe most people have only ever had crappy cheap grocery store fruit cakes?

Fruit cake is literally one of my favorite foods, and I don't really feel like I have esoteric taste in the general case.

vidarh7• 9 years ago

For my part I've never understood why people want fruit in cakes at all. I live in the UK where it is a national obsession to put fruit in cakes. I'm used to much more extensive use of cremes (egg, vanilla, regular), possibly combined with berries in Norway, but not nearly as often with fruit (we do get some, especially apple pies, but I at least perceive the selection as much more varied, where it's often a challenge to avoid pastry where the filling isn't meat or minced fruit in British bakeries...

(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)

logfromblammo• 9 years ago

I'd eat fruit cake more often if it wasn't like the tungsten of calorically-dense foods (compared to chocolate as gold).

Great for arctic and antarctic expeditions, but not so much for sitting on bums in front of screens.

_joel2• 9 years ago

Agreed, I'm very partial to a good fruit cake.

stephenhuey• 9 years ago

Plenty of my friends are surprised to hear that some of us actually like them! I grew up on Collin Street Bakery fruitcakes which are shipped all over from Corsicana, Texas. We even ate them in Nigeria when relatives would send them out to us via travelers.

teh_klev• 9 years ago

My dad had a penchant for fruit slices [0]. When we were kids he used to wave them in front of our faces and told us he was eating a "flies graveyard". More or less put me off any cake or patisserie that contained currants, sultanas and raisins, or in fact all fruits for life; even now at the tender age of 50 I'm only just beginning to appreciate apple and cherry pies.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/fKbWb

nsxwolf2• 9 years ago

I'm glad someone made a classic fruit cake joke. I haven't heard one in many years. I haven't seen a fruit cake in many years, either.

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.

chrisseaton2• 9 years ago

I haven't seen a fruit cake in many years, either.

Don't you see them at every wedding?

jackfoxy2• 9 years ago

Pro tip: fruitcakes are meant to be doused in in alcohol, usually brandy, rum, or whiskey. That makes them edible.

delinka• 9 years ago

"edible" in the sense that they can be processed by mastication. also in the sense that after you've consumed enough, you no longer care about the flavor or ... tenderness.

obilgic• 9 years ago

Why does it come in a metal box?

dsfyu404ed2• 9 years ago

You don't just wrap a cake in a bag, toss it in the bottom of a ship and expect it to be in good condition when it arrives on the other side of the world.

Metal and wooden crates/boxes did the same job then as cardboard boxes do now.

vidarh7• 9 years ago

Well, clearly they should have made the box from fruit cake rather than metal, since the cake looks to be in better shape (no, I'm not entirely serious)

wsgeek• 9 years ago

Apparently nobody liked Fruitcake 100 years ago either

mixmastamyk• 9 years ago

I once visited a whaling station down there and it was quite cool to see all the "steampunk" tech laying around, though rusting.

Also there was a British (I think) outpost that had canned food on the shelves from the late 1950s, was a bit surreal.

DannyB2• 9 years ago

It's just as good as any fruitcake passed around at Christmas. It never gets opened. It stays perfectly preserved. When you receive the fruitcake at Christmas, you leave it wrapped, and gift it to someone else next Christmas. Only a finite number of fruitcakes need be manufactured. Thus resources are conserved. Only a finite number of fruitcakes ever had to be purchased. Again, resources and economics. It's economical because when you receive the fruitcake as a gift, you have a free gift to give someone next year without spending money. It can be passed around almost indefinitely Best if used by August 9, 2047.

zzalpha• 9 years ago

I wonder if it goes down to the level of physics. I posit a fundamental Law of The Conservation of Fruitcakes.

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...

CharlesW• 9 years ago

"If you wish to make a fruitcake from scratch, you must first invent the universe?"

frandroid• 9 years ago

Next up, create a fruitcake-based ICO: fruitcoin.

jononor• 9 years ago

A cryptocurrency backed by fruitcakes? Or maybe proof-of-work via fruitcake production

david-cako• 9 years ago

We just have to make sure there's no blockchain forks that devalue existing fruitcake.

dzaragozar2• 9 years ago

Hahaha I read the title with fruitcake as the slang for lunatic: really old lunatic found in Antarctica's oldest building :)

werdnapk• 9 years ago

Where is this considered slang for lunatic? I've only heard this as slang for homosexual.

grogenaut• 9 years ago

Heard it all the time in Missouri growing up.

dzaragozar2• 9 years ago

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fruitcake

Second meaning

hanoz2• 9 years ago

It's common in Britain. As far as I know the thinking is: nut (head) => nut case / nuts / nutty etc. => "nuttier than a fruitcake" => fruitcake.

civilian• 9 years ago

You might listen to the song "Fruitcakes" by Jimmy Buffett, he plays with this pun. :]

y-haminator• 9 years ago

They should send a piece of it to steve mre

Sleeep2• 9 years ago

Jay Leno ate some of a 125 year old fruitcake on his show in 2003 - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/maybe-he-shouldve-let-it-breathe...

yellowapple• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's normal for fruitcake.

Taniwha• 9 years ago

I've always been amused by Americans' hate relationship with fruitcake, all I can assume is that they've never ever had good fruitcake

notadoc• 9 years ago

Does fruit cake get better with a century of age or is it still terrible?

100-year old fruit cake found in Antarctica's oldest building

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