I'm a little late making fruitcake this year, but I finally found my mother-in-law's recipe and have everything gathered to bake it today and start soaking it in brandy for the next few weeks.
There are some outstanding fruitcakes available to purchase, but you may have to try quite a few not-so-great ones to find the good ones. Years ago, my husband's father was a contractor and a local lumber company gave an outstanding fruitcake (from somewhere in Texas?) to all the building contractors. But time passed, his father stopped being a contractor, the lumber yard closed, and the fruitcake supply chain ended. It was far more fruit and nuts than cake, and it had one more advantage--no citron.
What is citron, anyway? According to Wikipedia, It's an ancient fruit from the Middle East. Here's the first paragraph under "uses," which illustrates my point exactly:
The citron is unlike the more common citrus species, such as the lemon or orange. While those more popular fruits are peeled to consume their pulpy and juicy segments, the citron's pulp is dry, containing a small quantity of insipid juice, if any. The main content of a citron fruit is the thick white rind, which adheres to the segments, and cannot be separated from them easily.
Also under uses are mentioned its ancient medicinal qualities, its use in tea and a form of sugar, but nowhere does it mention American fruitcake.
Perhaps the better question is, does anyone even like citron? No one I know does. So if no one likes it, why do commercial companies keep putting it in the fruitcake?
That might explain why a dense block of fruitcake is the gift that keeps on being re-gifted.
