Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager here. The lonely fruitcake, rich and candied fruit, nuts and spices, and heavy with Roman brandy, has become a much maligned confection that doubles as a punch line. But hey, the joke may be on us. While we succumb to rising seas, roaming zombies, or warring dictators, the
lowly fruitcake hunkers down for survival. Fruitcakes may outlast us all case in point, a one hundred and six year old fruitcake, still in its original tin, has been discovered at the Cape a Deer outpost in Victoria Land, East Antarctica, and according to conservationists, it's almost edible. Stored properly, a fruitcake can easily aged to thirty years and still be eaten.
But more than a century the aged fruit cake, found wrapped in a wax paper inside a ten spent the majority of the nineteen hundreds in a long abandoned research station. It dates back to the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition, which was conducted from nineteen ten to nineteen thirteen. Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer who led the mission listed the food
stuff among the camp's inventory. A New Zealand based team from the Antarctic Heritage Trust recovered the fruit cake and about fifteen hundred other artifacts from historic huts at Cape a Deer. The huts, which were the first ever built on Antarctica, were fashioned in eighteen ninety nine by Carston Borch Grivink, a Norwegian explorer, and used again in nineteen eleven by Captain Scott and other members of his expedition, two months after the team launched the foray to the
geographic South Pole. Scott and his team finally achieved their goal on January seventeenth, nineteen twelve, only to discover a Norwegian flag. It had been planted and left by explorer roled Emunson, who had become the first human to reach it thirty three days Prior blizzards delayed their return, and Scott and his team died at the end of March in nineteen twelve. Their bodies and diaries were found eight months later, and the huts they once occupied have become
a historic monument. The conservationist team that recovered the Scott artifacts began working on the site in May of twenty sixteen. Other items, including meat, fish and canned jams. Hmmm, did not fare as well as that fruitcake. In a statement, Lizzie Meek, the Trust's program manager for Artifacts, wrote that there was a very slight rancid butter smell to it, but other than that the cake looked and smelled edible. She had no doubt that the extreme cold and antarctica
had assisted the preservation. At a specialized lab in the Canterbury Museum in christ Church, New Zealand, the fruit cakes container will undergo rust removal, chemical stabilization and a repair of the wax paper covering the fruit cake. The cake, however, will be left to its own devices. After proper restoration, the fruit cake will be returned to the hut where it was found in the Antarctic, which is now part
of an Antarctic Specially Protected Area. Today's episode was written by Laurie L. Dove, produced by Dylan Fagan, and for more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff Works dot com.