Fruitcake

What would the holidays be without jokes about fruitcake — that it’s leaden, dry and hard, better used as a doorstop or dumbbell than served as dessert? Every December, fruitcake’s loathsomeness is enshrined on greeting cards and in cartoons. The comedian Johnny Carson famously cracked that there was but one fruitcake in existence that’s passed around continuously from person to person. Fruitcake, in short, is an archetype of bad food. While it’s arguably appropriate to malign mass-produced fruitcakes — the […]