Talk:Fruitcake

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Page moved. There seem to be enough support votes, based on valid arguments, with only one oppose. Plus the page was moved away from the target title without a move request last year, so that is the default title even in a no consensus situation. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 22:45, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Fruit cake → Fruitcake – This was moved without discussion last year with the rationale "Most WP:Common name for the cake. Fruitcake is more common for insults and other alternative uses". However, the use of "fruitcake" as an insult is not a reason to move the article on the cake, and my checking seems to suggest that "fruitcake" is in fact the more common term in recent years; see Google Ngram results since 1940 for evidence, or raw book results. No doubt some uses of "fruitcake" in the Google Books corpus do result from the usage of "fruitcake" as an insult, but that means very little; the pejorative usage is a direct reference to the food and ought to be included in consideration of the proper name. 168.12.253.66 (talk) 21:51, 19 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Is this serious? The "fruitcake" link goes to uses of fruitcake as something nutty rather than to a cake containing fruit. The first result in the Google book link is: "That is until Del Pritchard walked into his life. DEL PRITCHARD WAS A TOTAL FRUITCAKE... But Del was a fruitcake with money." While the "fruit cake" link goes to recipes for cake containing fruit, such as "Nothing beats the rich aroma of fruits and spices that wafts through the house when a fruit cake is baking.".  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  22:39, 19 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Support for procedural reasons (to undo an undiscussed move) and on the merits (per nom). Interestingly, according to the Google Ngram Viewer, "fruit cake" was once more common but hasn't been for a number of decades.  —  AjaxSmack   03:13, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * That graph shows usage of terms, but not what the terms mean. The term fruitcake meaning nutter has been growing in popularity for sure. But that has nothing to do with cake containing fruit. I think you have been led up the garden path by the IP. Did you look at the IP's book links? Worth doing that as it clearly shows were the usage lays: fruitcake = nutter; fruit cake = cake with fruit. This is something of a wind up I'm sure. That IP address has a history of trolling.  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  15:19, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This graph shows nutter, fruit cake and fruitcake. Fruit cake remains fairly constant, while fruitcake grows as nutter falls, and when nutter rises, fruitcake falls. I think that shows a close correlation between fruitcake and nutter, and no relationship between fruitcake/nutter and fruit cake.  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  15:40, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

content=slice+of+fruit+cake%2C+slice+of+fruitcake&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cslice%20of%20fruit%20cake%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cslice%20of%20fruitcake%3B%2Cc0 Google Ngram] for "slice of fruit cake" v "slice of fruitcake" (as an attempt to exclude pejorative uses) and "fruit cake" wins by a sliver. "Fruit cake" also wins for British English (my own dialect) which explains why I am not comfortable with "fruitcake". I wonder if the Ngram for English is showing US bias? Hard so say. Anyway, I'm not convinced that "fruitcake" is the norm nowadays worldwide. Francis Davey (talk) 09:36, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose I'm not convinced by the ngram, consider this [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?
 * Good point about the WP:ENGVAR issue. However, when I changed "slice of..." to "piece of..." in this Ngram Result, "fruitcake" shows the same usage trend as that without the preface, i.e. more common over the last few decades.  This seems to confirm a geographic difference in usage.  Does this topic have WP:TIES? —  AjaxSmack   02:31, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Strong support as per WP:ENGVAR... a little history-diving shows that the article was in American English as fruitcake, which matches my own personal tendency to want to write it without the space. I don't think there are any WP:TIES, but WP:RETAIN seems to dictate that we put it back at "fruitcake", a la yogurt. Non-stub version that uses "fruitcake" and is clearly AmE: (notice "centered" right below the section break).  Red Slash 03:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment ISTM this is really a question as to whether the article should be in US or Commonwealth English. My UK-English OED's entry states: "Fruit cake: a cake containing dried fruit; fruitcake: (slang) an eccentric or mad person" Samatarou (talk) 20:16, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * So then, since the article was originally in American English, should we move it back? Red Slash 03:20, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support. Not sure if it is an ENGVAR issue at all. I'm British and I would say the commonest term in the UK (and the one I'd use) is "fruitcake". Should be moved back to the original title. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:18, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support. Like Necrothesp, I don't think this is an ENGVAR issue, but the article did start at fruitcake. Jonathunder (talk) 15:38, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support move back to fruitcake. I'm not convinced it matters much either way, but let's first revert the undiscussed move, this is obviously controversial (which surprises me a little, considering how much the article needs work in other ways, but there you go) and I'm reasonably confident that an RM if it had been raised would have failed. So the onus of proof should be on those who want to move to fruit cake. (It's also a bit more elegant in my opinion, considering that this is the primary meaning of both phrases but there aren't significant competing meanings of fruit cake, but that's just a personal preference unsupported by policy AFAIK.) Andrewa (talk) 17:23, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Pudding/Duff - Remove
I am concerned that the references to Christmas Pudding and Plum Duff (mentioned under the heading for New Zealand) are misleading.

Christmas Pudding is a direct (1) lineal descendant of medieval puddings of meat and vegetables, boiled , and with fruit and spices added for flavour. The meat is nowadays represented only by the use of suet, and the vegetables are reduced to at most a token of grated carrot , but leaving aside the question of ingredients, the fact that it is boiled represents a significant difference from fruitcake, which like all cakes is baked by convection in an oven. Christmas Pudding has traditionally been boiled in a cloth or pudding basin--whether in the UK, Australia , or New Zealand --and accordingly is cooked at a temperature never exceeding 100C. A cake, on the other hand, is dry-baked at a temperature far in excess of that: generally in the range 175-190C ; for a heavy cake such as a fruitcake typically in a falling oven, but from around 175-200C only down as far as 150C or 140C.

Plum Duff (2) was indeed a colonial dish of New Zealand, and also of Australia , and in both cases was based on the Plum Puddings of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries: here the word 'plum' refers to dried plums (prunes), which by extension had come to refer to any dried fruit. And not only do they contain similar ingredients, but they are also puddings, and accordingly also cooked by boiling rather than by baking (which is one reason for their living on both on shipboard and in colonial Australia and New Zealand, as both sailors and drovers, shepherds, shearers and many other early colonists had little access to ovens).

In summary, Plum Duff and Christmas Pudding are not specific to New Zealand, and so should not be specifically mentioned under that heading. They are not two different things, but are aspects of the same thing, namely a boiled descendent of the meat puddings of old--and accordingly more closely related to a haggis than any cake. More seriously, the significant difference in cooking methods suggests that the references to Plum Duff and Christmas Pudding are misleading and should be removed from an article that focuses on a baked cake.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Whilst there was a break in the English tradition of puddings for half a century from the 1660s, this was not universal over all the European continent. The German-born Hanoverian King George 1 supported their re-introduction, and indeed the recipe for Christmas Pudding that was served from his kitchens is reputed to still be in use by the British monarchy to this day.

2. The term "Duff" is alledgedly due to the peculiarities of English spelling, and a story printed in 1893 explains it thus: if R-O-U-G-H is pronounced "Ruff", then D-O-U-G-H should similarly be pronounced "Duff".

Tannguera (talk) 15:05, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

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