‘Fruitcake is having a moment:’ Johnny Carson’s pointed jokes set the industry back, but this holiday tradition is making a triumphant return 

It was around Christmas in 1989, when Johnny Carson held a small box up to the “Tonight Show” cameras.

“What do you think this weighs?” Carson said, his wrist bending from the weight. “It’s only a small box. But it weighs about 2 pounds.”

It was a holiday fruitcake, but it might as well have been a magic pistol, about to fire a devastating bullet at the fruitcake industry.

“Nobody eats (fruitcakes),” Carson said. “You put it up in the closet somewhere, then you wait until next Christmas, and you give it to somebody else.”

The next six minutes of the “Tonight Show” included joke after joke about the density and indestructibility of the most unappealing of holiday desserts. Carson fired jabs while running video of a faux demolition company making half-hearted attempts to cut the cake open.

Meanwhile, in Corsicana, Texas, folks at a century-old, family-operated fruitcake company — the largest in the nation — held its breath.

“I grew up in the fruitcake business,” Collin Street Bakery partner Hayden Crawford said last week. “I’ll turn 70 in the spring. I saw the whole thing. I saw the demand for fruitcake as it grew to an enormous point, where we were making almost 4 million pounds of fruitcake annually. Everyone wanted them: American Airlines, Bell Helicopter, American Express, they all were buying our fruitcakes, giving them to family and friends, customers, associates. It was the thing to do.

“Then along came Carson’s joke.”

A fruitcake joke would have been considered downright nutty centuries ago, when the Christmas dessert was seen as a sign of wealth and power.

The first crumbs of fruitcake history can be found in the tombs of ancient Egyptians, who were buried with cakes made of dried fruit and nuts to keep them well-nourished in the afterlife. The ancient Romans carried fruitcake-like snacks called satura, made from nuts, seeds, dried fruits and honey wine, as they marched to expand their vast empire.

In the 1400s, fruitcakes were forbidden after the Catholic Church deemed butter sinful during Advent, a declaration that led to dry cakes — and the creation of the first stollen, a traditional, fruit-studded German bread. By the turn of that century, the butter ban was over.

And when Britain began its imperial expansion in the late 16th century, fruitcake came along.

“For five months of the year, there was no fresh fruit in Britain,” said June Taylor, a British-born Bay Area jam maker and baker who sold Christmas cakes for 30 years. “When you think of those (fruitcake) ingredients, they’re not indigenous to the country. They are an inflection of the imperialist nation that Britain was, rampaging around the world, conquering, bringing back citrus, dried fruits, spices — and this became a holiday item.

“The Christmas cake is an incredibly important historical food, because it represents this generalized wealth shared in the community.”

So why the stateside scorn?

“I think the thing about fruitcake is that it’s tied into the bad rap that British food gets,” she said. “It’s one of the most extreme examples of the joke on British food. To be honest, that stereotype was one of the reasons I started my marmalade business.”

By the 1980s, Taylor was selling 1-pound Christmas cakes from her Berkeley shop that were 75% dried fruit and included four kinds of raisins as well as candied peels. She sourced a 15-year-old port from Wine Country to soak her cakes and create their signature flavor. It was a labor intensive process. Even with a partner in the kitchen, it took Taylor almost a month to fill orders — and that was with production capped at 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 staff said Taylor’s fruitcakes were the most stolen items in the store.

“One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard,” she said.

What’s the allure of fruitcake for bakers? It’s “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 one-pound loaf.”

Given the labor and the sheer volume of organic fruit packed into a single cake, that’s hardly surprising. The cakes have always been expensive. Taylor used to sell hers for nearly $80 each.

“There’s no economics in fruitcake anymore — not as an artisan,” she said. “People get aghast at spending money on food, but they don’t scream in front of the Apple store when they pay for a little bit of plastic. We don’t value the right things.”

Taylor closed her marmalade shop in 2020 and hasn’t made a fruitcake since, although she still has special projects underway.

At Collin Street Bakery, which opened in the late 1800s and claims to be the country’s first mail-order fruitcake business, the explosion in fruitcake sales that began in the 1970s continued to grow over the next decades. But the bakery noticed a change in mail-orders around the time of the Carson jokes. And though the company reached its highest-ever production in 2001, their internal data analysts knew it wouldn’t last.

The narrative had changed. Too many companies were producing low-quality fare that gave fruitcakes a bad name, Crawford said.

“We were swimming against the current,” he said. “And we all got into this health conscious craze. We moved away from eggs and butter and fats. Fruitcake is high caloric by nature, so it got swept in that same category.”

Crawford said the company took another blow about 20 years ago, when the Texas Lottery ran an ad that said, “Don’t give your relatives fruitcakes this Christmas; give them a scratch off.”

Crawford said the bakery got an apology later and assurances that the ad would stop airing. But, he said, “That’s what we were up against. There was a time where nobody ever thought about bashing fruitcake, because it was something your grandmother or great aunt made, and it was a family tradition. Until the Carson era.”

During Carson’s reign as host of the “Tonight Show,” the power of his jokes was nothing to laugh at. In 1973, he created a toilet paper shortage — yes, five decades before the real one — when he joked about one on TV, triggering a panic-buying spree across the country. Fruitcake jokes were often on the menu.

But as painful as that may have been, Collin Street Bakery staff found solace in a different Carson moment.

“He had a skit on his show years later, where he’d pull out old jokes that were no longer funny, read the joke and toss it in the fireplace,” Crawford said. “Fruitcake was one of the ones he tossed. He redeemed himself.”

Over the last 20 years, Collin Street’s fruitcakes have slowly seen sales numbers tick upward. That’s partly due to the pandemic, Crawford said, when online food sales took off. Fruitcakes last a long time and travel well.

“Fruitcake sales shot through the roof,” he said. “It was a recovery.”

And the home baking of the pandemic era may have helped, too, said Becky Courchesne, co-owner of Brentwood’s Frog Hollow Farm.

“People are revisiting homemade things again,” she said. “I think that might be why fruitcake is having another renaissance.”

Courchesne, who makes fruitcake with her farm’s dried apricots and peaches, candied orange peels, walnuts and molasses, all soaked in rum, expects to sell about 700 fruitcakes this year.

“Fruitcake is having a moment,” she said.

As for Lambert, after the 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 commercial kitchen. He’s never made more fruitcakes than he will this year: about 2,000.

“I’ve never been happier,” he said. “It’s a complete shock to me. Every day I break out laughing, because I can’t believe I’m here.”