Fruit Cake Taste Test

One of MREInfo's frequent visitors, Dave, wrote in with a comment about how he remembers when he was 10 years old his dad brought home a bunch of MCIs one day. They went through all the boxes and checked out all the components. Dave recalled giving all the fruitcakes to his dad. And that reminded me...I have a bunch of MCI cans laying around...and I was pretty sure I had a fruitcake can. I wondered how it'd look after all these year?

So for those of you wondering what a fruit cake from a 26-year old MCI looks and tastes like, wonder no more!

Here's a can of fruit cake taken from an MCI case dated 1978. The can didn't have any visible damage outside of a spot of rust that you can see on the first picture below.

Once I opened the can, I could hear the air hiss in...so it still had a good vacuum in it. I was expecting the contents to be dried up and maybe slightly fruit cake-looking. You can imagine my surprise when I got a look at what you see in pictures 2-4 - a very moist, fresh-looking fruit cake. There was nothing off about the smell - it smelled like a fruit cake - and from the small taste I tried, it tasted perfectly good, too.

Now, I'm not *that* crazy...I tasted it, but didn't actually ingest any of it - I just gave it a few chomps to get the flavor. If I were very hungry and actually liked fruit cake, I might have eaten the whole thing.

(click on images for larger picture)