All because of my love for a food that I dare not speak its name in gourmet company. 

I love fruitcake.

Yes, made from tubs of gleaming candied fruit. Even the “green things,” which are an honorable fruit called citron, a variety of citrus fruit that’s important in the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. (Or they might be green marachino cherries. Or dyed pineapple, depending on the blend. I don’t judge.)

I love the cake’s unusual nature, that there’s nothing like it the rest of the year. The burst of sweetness against the buttery cake. And the history. According to “Favorite Fruitcakes” by Moira Hodgson — yes, I own a book about fruitcake and wish I’d written one — they have a solid British history, and have been mentioned in literature, not always as the butt of jokes. In Truman Capote’s beautiful “A Christmas Memory,” the narrator recalls he and his beloved cousin gathering ingredients and making fruitcakes for gifts, and what it meant to him as an awkward, neglected child. Fruitcake lover or not, read it.

I love the cake’s unusual nature, that there’s nothing like it the rest of the year.

The only time my mother baked anything but cornbread was a fruitcake for which she combined boxed date-nut quick-bread or spice-cake mix with a tub of candied fruit from the A&P and chopped walnuts. No shelled nuts back then, so the two of us cracked walnuts while watching her soaps, which was tedious work, but I learned a lot — such as that a woman could have a baby without a husband.

She made minimalist fruitcake, but it stoked my fire.

If we ate it all before Christmas, she bought a Claxton cake. Everyone in the South knows Georgia’s Claxton. Log-like in color and shape, sticky-sweet, it’s the fruitcake that birthed a thousand haters. It’s not my favorite, either. But someone’s eating it — the company sold nearly $2 million worth in 2023.

Nor do I extol cake from a popular North Carolina bakery, which it proclaims is “full of nuts.” Then it’s not fruitcake, y’all. It’s nut cake. I’m willing to die on that sticky, candied hill.

I conceded to a fruitcake-hating husband and developed a recipe using dried fruit, which is acceptable. But I make fruitcake cookies for myself and let my fruitcake flag fly. Or I would if I could find one.