I belong to a small band of sisters and brothers who love fruitcake.  It arrived in yesterday’s mail: my fruitcake! For years I longed for the delicious fruitcake that arrived every Christmas from one of my Dad’s business associates.  As a child I learned to love fruitcake because of this yearly gift.  (I also loved liver and onions, but that’s another story.)   In my adult life I would often try again but could never find anything as scrumptious as that fruitcake and do, indeed, understand why all the pathetic jokes about doorstops masquerading as fruitcake circulate each Christmas without fail.  I would not buy cheap fruitcakes – the one time I did it after I was married, it just made me ever so sad that I wasn’t ten years old again, where a superb fruitcake would be delivered to our door without invitation or question about whether it would be good.  Every year I would vow to make the fruitcake from the Joy of Cooking – I love to read about the ritual of plunging it into powered suger and wrapping it in cheesecloth and pouring bourbon over it now and again for six weeks – but it required me to be proactive and get started before Thanksgiving to do it right, which of course I never remembered to do.

A few years back my Mom sent me a fruitcake made by the Trappist Monks at Gethsemani Abbey in Trappist, Kentucky.  It is the Holy Grail of fruitcake.  A fruitcake that melts in your mouth with whispers of bourbon and candied fruit and nuts and winter spices would not serve very well as a doorstop.  (Note: I had to stop writing this and go get a piece…)  Those of you who refuse to even consider that your preconceived notions of fruitcake might be skewed by the Walmart variety are missing out on something grand.  I would feel sorry for you except I would rather the secret not get out – more for me.

It is true that there is a limit to how much fruitcake one can eat.  A good fruitcake is rich, but not doorstop heavy.  I would not want it more than once a year, and Mom only sends half a cake – along with the the monks’ bourbon fudge which I can’t eat in the middle of the day when I still have patients to see – because I’m liable to be the only one eating more than one slice.  Even if it melts in your mouth it can add a doorstop or two to one’s hips.

 Now you know the truth.   You always wondered why I was so nutty.  I love fruitcake!