The snack for Christmas in Kolkata

Some brief notes on fruitcake (also known as plum cake)

Hello, Snackers. Today on Snack Stack:

Kolkata Fruitcake

Fruitcakes sold at Nahoum & Sons in Kolkata’s New Market. Photo by RNMitra via Getty.

The basics

Pretty much your standard fruitcake. A dense dessert flecked with fruit, soaked in rum (Old Monk brand, ideally), flavored with cloves and nutmeg, and topped with chopped nuts.

The place

Kolkata, India

The story

The story of this iconic Kolkatan Christmastime treat centers on a Jewish bakery in New Market, a shopping area whose name belies the fact that it’s been around since 1874. The bakery is right in the middle of the market—just look for the red storefront with a long sign across the top its gold letters spelling out “Nahoum & Sons Confectionary.” Inside, there are counters topped with white marble and glass cases displaying a seemingly endless variety of baked goods: chocolate cake and custard-filled doughnuts; chicken patties and garlic bread; macaroons and marzipan. Come December, Nahoum’s is especially popular for Kolkata residents in search of a local seasonal tradition: fruitcake.

Christmas is a national holiday in India, where it’s also known as Boro Din (“big day” in Hindi), a day of celebration that is often more secular than not. (Of course, there are plenty of people who get into it for the official baby-born-in-Bethlehem reasons: as writer Naresh Fernandes told NPR, about two percent of Indians are Christian, but “that's 2 percent of the population of one billion. So that is quite a lot of people for whom December 25th is very important.”) Still, the day’s festivities have a broad appeal and purpose, not contingent on beliefs or background—and fruitcake, a vestige of the long era of British colonialism, has a similarly diverse and uncategorizable popularity. In a 2014 piece for NPR’s food blog, The Salt, Sandip Roy wrote:

Cake knows no religion. At Nahoum and Sons, the city's only Jewish bakery, a lady who gave her name only as Mrs. Maxwell waits in a long line as her grandson plays with a toy pistol. … At Sheik Nuruddin's storefront bakery, there's a photograph of Mecca on the wall. But in December, you can rent his oven and his bakers for your own Christmas cake. The wood-fired oven turns out seven cakes an hour, from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., says Nuruddin.

Nahoum & Sons was founded in 1902 by Baghdadi Jews, part of a community that had begun immigrating to Kolkata in the early 1800s and by the time the bakery opened numbered somewhere between 1,800 and 4,000 people, depending on your sources. (Here’s more about the Baghdadi Jews of India; it’s an interesting history!) and numbered around 1,800 by the time the bakery opened. There are plenty of other places to get fruitcake, including Flurys, a tearoom in the British style, which “stays open all night on Christmas Eve,” but it’s Nahoum’s that has the longest lines, the most acclaim, the biggest reputation.

The bakery is still run by the Nahoum family—as of 2015, the owner was Isaac Nahoum, the grandson of the founder—and that continuity helps maintain a nostalgic, heritage-driven reputation, an essential part of the fruitcake’s appeal. In fact, resistance to change is part of the bakery’s own story, embodied in its old-fashioned treats and even its specific way of doing things: they don’t use any preservatives, giving their products a shorter shelf life that those of some competitors, and when one writer visited the shop in 2015, the manager insisted the cash register be included in the photos accompanying the story because the machine itself was on the cusp of turning 100 years old.

Anyway, here’s a little tour o New Market, including a visit to Nahoum & Sons near the end:

Get it here

If you aren’t able to get to Nahoum’s, here’s a version of their recipe.

Sources and further reading

“A Punch Line In The U.S., Christmas Fruitcake Is Big In Calcutta” by Sandip Roy for National Public Radio’s The Salt.

“The foodie traveller ... visits Kolkata’s last Jewish bakery” by Lauren Razavi for The Guardian.

“On the fruit cake trail at Nahoum's, Kolkata's last Jewish bakery” by Priyadarshinee Raksit for The Week (India).

“The last Jewish bakery of Kolkata” (no byline!) in The Times of India.

Happy snacking!