Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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• December 2011

It’s Time To Write Some Holiday Haiku [Mrs. Harvey’s Fruitcake Recipe Turns 60]

Posted Nov 29, 2011 by Jeff Houck

Updated Nov 29, 2011 at 02:47 PM

Six decades.

It may be hard to believe, but that’s how long Lucille Harvey’s recipe for making White Fruitcake has run in the Tampa Tribune.

Think about that.

In 1951, Harry Truman was president. That same year, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” was first published. “I Love Lucy” debuted on TV. “The King & I” opened on Broadway.

The world changes. Nations come and go. Life moves on.

Fruitcakes last forever.

It was that same year that Mrs. Harvey’s fruitcake took second place in the Tribune’s fruitcake recipe contest. Few remember who the winner was, but Lucille’s cake captured something in the imagination of home bakers.

Bakers like Mary Ellen Ahrens, a former Tampa resident who now lives in Greensboro, N.C.

“I baked my fruitcakes today so I could give them out at Thanksgiving,” Mary Ellen wrote last week in an e-mail. “What fun! It brings back so many happy memories of my mother baking them all the years I was growing up.

“Do you know,” she continued, “that Mrs. Harvey’s recipe is on the lid of the Paradise candied cherries/pineapple?”

I wasn’t aware of that, Mary Ellen, but it doesn’t surprise me. Mrs. Harvey’s holiday dessert has always inspired great love.

Which is why we’ve honored that tradition since 2006 by holding the Mrs. Harvey’s White Fruitcake Haiku Contest.

The contest has become so prestigious that its reputation has spread to all corners of the country.

During Thanksgiving 2009, Erin Renouf Mylroie of Santa Clara, Utah, read in her newspaper about Tribune’s annual haiku contest.

The Deseret News borrowed the idea and held a pie haiku contest that year, with Thanksgiving pie being the focus instead of fruitcake.

Mylroie bested more than 350 submitted poems last year with this haiku:

Snowmen aren’t picky.

Frosty Reception.

Some of her stronger competition last year included these ditties:

On the thirteenth day

That’s when we broke up

Sonya Pflanzer, Tampa

Fruitcake from Aunt Ruth

Good thing they don’t speak

Ellen Welch, Lakeland

Dog died this morning

Better him than me.

Joe Villeneuve, Tampa

Fruitcake lovers (and haters), it’s time to do so once again. Hoist your pencils or pens, or whatever it is you use to make the word stuffs. Write a traditional haiku—first and third lines of five syllables, the second line has seven—and send it in.

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or snail-mail it to:

Fruitcake Haiku Contest
200 S. Parker St.
Tampa FL 33606.

Please include your address and a daytime phone number where you can be reached.

Write as many of those addictive little poems as you like, but the deadline for receiving submissions is Dec. 12.

Shannon O’Malley, author of the book “Apocalypse Cakes; Recipes For The End” (Running Press, $14), has agreed to be this year’s celebrity judge.

May the best fruitcake win.