Bruce C. Steele

ASHEVILLE – When people say fruitcake lasts forever, they probably don't really expect it to be around quite this long.

But a small piece of cake, likely from the groom's cake at the 1924 wedding of Biltmore heiress Cornelia Vanderbilt and English aristocrat John Cecil, is now part of the Biltmore collection of Vanderbilt-related artifacts.

And what does nonagenarian fruitcake look like? Old cheese.

Candler resident Frederick Cothran, 96, discovered the tiny gift box in a trunk he inherited from his aunt, Bonnie Revis, a cook at Biltmore House from 1924-35. He called Biltmore's museum services department to say he had what he thought was a piece of cheese from Biltmore House.

"I was intrigued by this 90-year-old cheese," said Laura Overbey, collections manager in Biltmore's Museum Services department, who spoke with Cothran. "He said he felt it was time for it to come home."

Overbey went to visit Cothran at his home. "We sit down and we talk and he slides this small box over, about the size of a double pack of Juicy Fruit gum," Overbey said. Inside were many layers of paper, a sheet of something like tinfoil — and the "cheese."

The gift box, decorated with the words "Biltmore House" and monograms corresponding to Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt and John Francis Amherst Cecil, pinpointed the artifact to the couple's April 29, 1924, wedding. But it did not solve the mystery of what was inside.

Back at Biltmore, one of Overbey's coworkers happened to be talking about "how a friend had found a piece of Grover Cleveland's wedding cake" — and she realized what she likely had in the pretty little box. Even more coincidental, as she walked into the office of her director, Ellen Rickman, to tell her the news, she heard an oral history to which Rickman was listening, about Cornelia's nuptials.

"Right as I was coming in the door, this gentleman (on the recording) is saying he remembers getting a small box of fruitcake for the wedding," Overbey said. Thus it was that an interview done in 1989 helped a collections manager in 2014 to identify a piece of cake from 1924.

In the interview, an elderly Paul Towe, whose father worked at Biltmore in the 1920s and '30s, recalled attending Cornelia's wedding as a small boy. His sister, Sarah, was a flower girl, and he remembered that "everybody got a little white box with their name on it with a piece of fruitcake."

"We can't find anything in our records about the kind of wedding cake Cornelia had," Overbey said, "but it was a tradition for the groom to have fruitcake."

The cake is not only old but well-traveled: A stamp on the inside bottom of the box identifies it as being from Rauscher's, a bakery in Washington, D.C., where the Asheville Vanderbilts also had a home, and where Cornelia is thought to have met Cecil, a British diplomat.

It's far too late to nibble at this cake (not that Biltmore would allow it), but it likely did not differ significantly in taste from modern fruitcakes, according to Asheville food historian and author Rick McDaniel.

"Fruitcakes have been around since Medieval times," he said. "They were some of the first types of cake and really have not changed a whole lot over the years. The recipes in the early 20th century are pretty much the recipes you would have found 100 years earlier or 100 years later."

While the D.C. bakers can't have expected the confection to have lasted 90 years, "fruitcakes can last a pretty good while," McDaniel said, since they have many dried components and fewer perishable ingredients than traditional wedding cake and may be soaked in alcohol, which can act as a preservative.

"These are pretty dense little critters that will last for quite a while," he said — perhaps a year if properly packaged and refrigerated, and as long as 5-10 years if frozen.

This particular sliver of fruitcake has finally found its freezer, in the Biltmore collections department, gift box and all. It has caused quite a to-do for as tiny an object as it is. The box is just 4 inches long, about 1.5 inches wide and less than an inch high.

Overbey knows the precise dimensions because she measured it before packaging it — basically in several layers of plastic zipper bags — for freezing, nearly a century too late.

"I went home that night and my husband said what did you do today," Overbey recalled, "and I said, 'Well, I measured some cake.'"

Black Fruit Cake

Adapted from "Sweets and Meats," published by the Tryon Street M.E. Church in Charlotte in 1912:

1 pound butter

1 pound brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

8 eggs, well beaten

1 pound flour

1 tablespoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and ground cloves

2 pounds raisins and currants, well-washed and seeded

1 pound figs, cut small

1/2 pound citron

1 pint black molasses

1/2 cake chocolate, grated fine (an amount likely equivalent to 4-6 ounces of semisweet baker's chocolate)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup cold water

Mix all the fruits and dredge with a bit of the flour. Set aside.

Cream butter and sugars "until very light," then add eggs. Add flour and spices.

Mix in fruits, then molasses and chocolate. Finally add cold water, in which soda has been dissolved. "The water prevents from being dry."

Pour batter into 1 or more greased and floured cake or loaf pans and "bake in a moderate oven" 3-4 hours. (A "moderate oven" is about 350 degrees.)

When cool, ice as desired and "place in a cake box or can, one month before Xmas. You will find this fine."