Fruitcake maker defends holiday treat as gourmet

CORSICANA, Texas -- The way Bob McNutt sees it, there are two kinds of fruitcake people.

The naysayers see fruitcake as the Rodney Dangerfield of desserts. It gets no respect, and nary a nibble.

The "dee-vo-tees," as the Collin Street Bakery president calls them, order early and often, shipping fruitcakes around the world and savoring the sweet dessert like a fine wine.

"It's got a wonderful long finish, which is unusual for food," said McNutt, who prefers an after-dinner slice with a glass of port.

And he's not the only one to elevate fruitcake to gourmet status. He says "foodie" magazines also are featuring the deserts made in Corsicana and elsewhere.

So why the bad rap for such a culinary delight?

Maybe the critics have only tried inferior varieties, McNutt said.

"It's like picking a steakhouse," he said. "You can get a steak as tough as leather or a prime piece you can cut with a fork."

McNutt says his bakery's original Deluxe fruitcake, made with the same recipe bakery founders brought from Germany more than a century ago, is the top chop -- with a price tag starting at about $18.

The bakery, which had sales of $39 million in 2001 -- most from mail-order fruitcake sales -- produced 1.5 million fruitcakes last year, each made within days of shipping.

One style is made of 30 percent Texas pecans, along with pineapple and papaya grown by the bakery in Costa Rica.

Other varieties are pineapple and pecan; apricot and pecan; and apple cinnamon and pecan. The bakery uses a million pounds of pecans each year, McNutt said.

For many customers, a good fruitcake harkens back to earlier days, when their mothers and grandmothers baked the treat as a holiday tradition.

"Fruitcake is a comfort food," McNutt said. "When you talk about Christmas and the holidays, you get warm and fuzzy feelings."

The bakery recently commissioned a telephone poll of 804 people, who said the dense dessert conjured up thoughts of home, hearth, family and friends. More than one in four said they have given a fruitcake, and many of those sent more than one. High-volume givers were much more likely to be men.

Verna Rogers of Athens sends fruitcakes each year to her sister in Austin and daughter in Montana. Though her grandson didn't care for the cake, the rest of the family is hooked, she said.

"You couldn't make a better cake," she said, peeking through a viewing window to the Corsicana bakery's production floor.

The bakery runs at full throttle each fall, with more than 700 workers on three shifts.

Lined at long steel tables, the workers are mostly women wearing aprons and hair nets. Working quickly, they place an exact number of red cherries and green-dyed pineapple to cakes on conveyer belts to huge ovens.

By the way, fruitcakes don't last forever, McNutt says. The Deluxe cake will keep up to six months refrigerated, and a while longer frozen.