CORSICANA, Texas -- After 70 years and a lot of vile Christmas fruitcakes, Edward Ashe had about given up.
"Fruitcakes are really the pits," said Mr. Ashe, a pharmacist who retired from Baltimore to Georgia.
"They're miserable. Either people don't know how to bake 'em properly or they feel like anything they make with dough and fruit in it they can call a fruitcake and get away with it."
You're nodding yes. You know what he's talking about. In all likelihood, you, too, think fruitcakes are best used as doorstops.
Just about everyone does.
Has there ever been a food so mocked?
The joke is that there's only one fruitcake, which keeps getting passed around.
On the old "Tonight Show," a forklift dropped a fruitcake on Johnny Carson's desk, which dutifully collapsed.
So it is with awe and wonder that one contemplates the tiny Texas town of Corsicana.
Here, no one scoffs.
This is home to the Collin Street Bakery, which is, by the estimate of its owner, William McNutt Jr., the largest fruitcake mail-order emporium in the nation.
This is the belly of the beast.
Say what you will, Ed Ashes of the world. In Corsicana, fruitcake is king.
The noise from the assembly line at the Collin Street Bakery is deafening, like the clamor of a bowling alley and a muffler repair shop rolled into one.
Pans clang, conveyor belts rattle, machines thump and whump, all punctuated by a steady pneumatic whoosh from somewhere over near the ovens.
The company is in full fruitcake frenzy, churning out 33,000 of them a day. Collin Street will weigh in with about 2,000 tons for the year.
Collin Street makes 1.5 million fruitcakes a year. Scoff all you want, but demand is up 5 percent to 10 percent over last year and has risen steadily for decades, according to Bob McNutt, a company vice president and William's son.
Situated 50 miles south of Dallas in the depleted oil town of Corsicana, which retains some downtown cobblestone streets and awnings to keep the summer sun at bay, Collin Street is part of a region of bakeries known, as they could be only in Texas, as the Fruitcake Triangle.
The proximity of pecans (27 percent of the Collin Street fruitcake) has given rise to several nearby bakeries such as Mary of Puddin' Hill, the Original Texas Ya-Hoo Cake Co., and Eilenberger's.
Collin Street was founded in 1896 by Gus Weidmann, a German baker, and local entrepreneur Tom McElwee.
The bakery, which initially served local customers, got into mail-order after circus performers took word and samples to friends around the world.
William McNutt's father bought the bakery in 1946. Today, Collin Street does a fourth of its $32 million-a-year business overseas, with Japan as its best foreign customer.
How do they do it?
The fruitcake recipe at Collin Street is a secret.
Whatever's in them, writer Calvin Trillin argues, fruitcakes can be swallowed but not digested -- so people give them as presents but never actually eat them.
"A regular eater of fruitcake," Mr. Trillin said, "would eventually have no room for digestible food in his stomach and would therefore starve to death, probably during Christmas dinner."
William McNutt chuckles about all this.
"We laugh all the way to the bank," Mr. McNutt said.
Despite the denigration, fruitcake aficionados are out there, millions of them, oppressed but loyal.
They write -- in letters sometimes addressed to Fruitcake, U.S.A. -- praise and even poetry "about a fruit cake so rich and sweet, it's always baked on Collin Street."
One writer wanted a mailing address updated to reflect the results of a sex-change operation, now that he had become she.
A restaurant in Norway sent its menu, featuring reindeer meat and fruitcake.
A Swedish woman wrote, lauding the fruitcake and, by the way, could anyone fix her up with a husband?
Then there was Ed Ashe, the retired pharmacist in Brunswick, Ga., where he sampled Collin Street fruitcake a month ago.
"Finally!" he wrote. "After living 70 years on this planet, I have learned . . . what a fruitcake is supposed to taste like."