It was around Christmas in 1989 when Johnny Carson held a small box as much as the cameras on The Tonight Show.
“How much do you think that weighs?” Carson said, his wrist bending under the load. “It’s just a small box. But it weighs about 2 pounds.”
It was a vacation fruitcake, nevertheless it might as well have been a magic pistol about to fireside a devastating bullet on the fruitcake industry.
“Nobody eats (fruitcake),” Carson said. “You put it in the closet somewhere, then wait until next Christmas and then give it to someone else.”
The next six minutes of The Tonight Show featured joke after joke concerning the density and indestructibility of the least attractive Christmas desserts. Carson fired jabs while showing a video of a fake demolition company making half-hearted attempts to slice the cake.
Meanwhile, in Corsicana, Texas, people at a century-old, family-run fruitcake company — the most important within the country — held their breath.
“I grew up in the fruitcake business,” Hayden Crawford, partner at Collin Street Bakery, said last week. “I'll be 70 within the spring. I've seen the entire thing. I saw the demand for fruitcake grow tremendously and we were producing nearly 4 million kilos of fruitcake annually. Everyone wanted them: American Airlines, Bell Helicopter, American Express, all of them bought our fruitcakes and gave them away to family and friends, customers and employees. It was exactly the correct thing.
“Then came Carson’s joke.”
Centuries ago, a fruitcake joke was considered downright crazy, when the Christmas dessert was still considered an indication of wealth and power.
The first crumbs of fruitcake history might be present in the tombs of the traditional Egyptians buried with cakes made out of dried fruits and nuts to maintain them well fed within the afterlife. The ancient Romans carried fruitcake-like snacks called Saturamade out of nuts, seeds, dried fruits and honey wine as they marched to expand their vast empire.
In the 14th century, fruit cakes were banned by the Catholic Church Butter is taken into account a sin during Adventa declaration that led to dry cakes—and the creation of the primary Stollen, a standard German bread studded with fruit. By the turn of the century the butter ban was over.
And when Britain began its imperial expansion within the late sixteenth century, fruitcake got here onto the scene.
“For five months of the year there was no fresh fruit in Britain,” said June Taylor, a British native Bay Area jam maker and baker who sold Christmas cakes for 30 years. “When you concentrate on these (fruitcake) ingredients, they are usually not native to the country. They are an expression of the imperialist nation that Britain was because it rampaged world wide, conquering and bringing back citrus, dried fruit and spices – and this became a vacation item.
“Christmas cake is an incredibly important historical food because it represents this common wealth that is shared in the community.”
So why the contempt for states?
“I think the thing about fruitcake is that it ties into the bad reputation of British food,” she said. “It’s one of the most extreme examples of the British food joke. Honestly, this stereotype was one of the reasons I started my jam business.”
In the Nineteen Eighties, Taylor sold one-pound Christmas cakes in her Berkeley store that were 75 percent dried fruit and included 4 sorts of raisins and candied peel. She sourced a 15-year-old port wine from Wine Country to soak her cakes and provides them their signature flavor. It was a labor-intensive process. Even with a partner within the kitchen, it took Taylor almost a month to meet the orders – with a maximum production of 200 cakes.
Both Taylor and former Bay Area baker Robert Lambert have sold fruitcakes to fans across the Bay, including at San Francisco's Bi-Rite Market, where employees said Taylor's fruitcakes were probably the most stolen items in the shop.
“One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard,” she said.
What's the appeal of fruitcake for bakers? It is “a showcase for fine ingredients,” Lambert said. “The best of the best. I think mine are the most expensive on the market, $75 for a 1 pound loaf.”
Given the hassle and sheer amount of organic fruit packed right into a single cake, that is hardly surprising. The cakes have all the time been expensive. Taylor sold hers for nearly $80 each.
“There’s no economics in fruitcake anymore – not as an artisan,” she said. “People are horrified when they spend money on groceries, but they don't scream outside the Apple Store when they pay for a bit of plastic. We don’t value the right things.”
Taylor closed her jam shop in 2020 and hasn't baked fruitcake since, although she still works on special projects.
Collin Street Bakery, which opened within the late nineteenth century and claims to be the country's first fruitcake mail-order business, continued the explosion in fruitcake sales that began within the Nineteen Seventies over the following few a long time. But the bakery noticed a change in mail order business across the time of the Carson jokes. And although the corporate reached its highest production ever in 2001, its internal data analysts knew that wouldn't last.
The narrative had modified. Too many corporations produced substandard food, giving fruitcake a foul repute, Crawford said.
“We were swimming against the tide,” he said. “And we’ve all fallen into this health-conscious craze. We have moved away from eggs, butter and fats. Fruitcake is naturally high in calories and has therefore been placed in the same category.”
Crawford said the corporate suffered one other blow about 20 years ago when the Texas Lottery ran an ad that said: “Don’t give fruitcake to your relatives for Christmas; Give them a scratch.”
Crawford said the bakery later received an apology and an assurance that it might stop airing the ad. But he said, “This is what we were dealing with. There was a time when no one thought to smash fruitcake because it was something your grandmother or great aunt made and it was a family tradition. Until the Carson era.”
During Carson's tenure as host of The Tonight Show, the ability of his jokes was no laughing matter. In 1973 It caused a bathroom paper shortage – yes, five a long time before the true one – when he joked about it on TV, sparking a buying panic across the country. Fruitcake jokes were often on the menu.
But as painful as that will have been, Collin Street Bakery employees found solace in one other Carson moment.
“Years later he had a skit on his show where he pulled out old jokes that were no longer funny, read the joke and threw it into the fireplace,” Crawford said. “Fruitcake was one of the ones he threw. He redeemed himself.”
Over the last 20 years, Collin Street's fruitcakes have seen slowly increasing sales. This was due partly to the pandemic, Crawford said, as online grocery sales took off. Fruit cakes have a protracted shelf life and are easy to move.
“Sales of fruit cake have gone through the roof,” he said. “It was a recovery.”
And pandemic-era home baking can have helped, too, said Becky Courchesne, co-owner of Brentwood's Frog Hollow Farm.
“People are resorting to homemade things again,” she said. “I think that might be why fruitcake is having another renaissance.”
Courchesne, who makes fruitcakes from her farm's dried apricots and peaches, candied orange peels, walnuts and molasses, all pickled in rum, expects to sell about 700 fruitcakes this 12 months.
“Fruitcake is having a moment,” she said.
As for Lambert, after fires in 2016 and 2020 forced him to evacuate his home near the Russian River, the baker moved to Wisconsin, bought three acres of land and built his own industrial kitchen. He has never made more fruit cakes than this 12 months: about 2,000.
“I’ve never been happier,” he said. “It's a complete shock for me. I laugh every day because I can’t believe I’m here.”
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