`MISUNDERSTOOD' CONFECTION STILL POPULAR.

Byline: Jeff Barnard Associated Press

You've heard the jokes.

``What are 10 good uses for a fruitcake? A Christmas tree stand, an anvil, a fallout shelter. . .''

So why, then, is Harry and David, the nation's biggest mail-order gift food catalog, selling more fruitcake than ever this Christmas?

Chalk up another one for the baby boomers.

``As people get older, their palates get more sophisticated. The baby boom is becoming more sophisticated in their taste,'' says Bill Williams, CEO of Bear Creek Corp., Harry and David's parent company.

It didn't hurt that Harry and David's fruitcake confection got the top recommendation this year from Consumer Reports. Sales are up 20 percent to nearly 100,000 fruitcakes, Williams said.

That's a small piece of overall annual sales of $300 million and 5 million packages that leave Harry and David during the Christmas season, but that doesn't mean fruitcake isn't serious business.

Even with the boost, Harry and David is not threatening to push Collin Street Bakery of Corsicana, Texas, off the top of the fruitcake heap. They ship 1.6 million fruitcakes weighing a total of 4 million pounds a year to all 50 states and 200 countries. So much for the Johnny Carson joke about there being only one fruitcake, which people keep passing on.

``Our philosophy is we can laugh along with everyone else,'' says President Bob McNutt, whose grandfather bought the Texas business in 1946. ``My joke is I have a jar where I store all the good fruitcake jokes. The jar is dusty and empty and I'm still waiting for a good one.''

Fruitcake originated in ancient Egypt and was cherished as an essential food for the afterlife, McNutt said. And Collin Street Bakery has been making fruitcake since 1896, when German baker Gus Weidmann stepped off the train in the oil boomtown.

Word spread after Weidmann's partner, cotton buyer Tom McElwee, slipped fruitcakes into the luggage of Ringling Bros. Circus performers before a world tour.

Now customers include Princess Caroline of Monaco, singer Lyle Lovett and ``Wheel of Fortune'' letter-turner Vanna White. A fruitcake even went on an Apollo space shot.

Why, then, is fruitcake the disrespected Rodney Dangerfield of holiday traditions?

``I think fruitcake is misunderstood,'' McNutt says. ``There is no standard of identity. If you ask someone what is butter, they know what butter is. If people had the same consistent quality in their fruitcake as we have, I don't think there would be that problem.''

Fruitcake could be compared to religion. Everyone likes his own. The monks of Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Ore., make a dense cake that is soaked in 120-proof brandy and aged for three months. Sliced thin and held up to the light, the translucent cherries and pineapple resemble the lights in a stained glass window.

Unlike its larger competitors, the abbey's fruitcake sales are down to about 20,000 pounds, perhaps because it finished fifth in the Consumer Reports ranking, said Brother Patrick, who handles telephone orders and prefers snacking on the abbey's biscotti. However, one of their cakes was sent to the South Pole and another to former professional quarterback Roger Staubach.

At Harry and David, the fruitcake confection is made with a recipe the brothers bought in 1957 from Tom Clark of California Inc. The original, handwritten in pencil on hotel stationery, survives in the company's archives. To guard the secret, the brothers would give two halves of the recipe to two different bakers and combine the batches at the end.

In the bakery, the nuts, candied cherries, candied pineapple and other ingredients are mixed thoroughly. As she has done for more than 20 years, Dione Skinner scoops the dough by the handful into paper-lined pans until the proper weight registers on a scale.

As the pans roll down the assembly line, Bonnie Lynch takes one off and carefully fits the nuts and fruit like pieces in a puzzle, making sure the cherries are evenly spaced and the nuts face up.

The pans are stacked in a 5-foot-tall rack, which baker Jeanne Warfield rolls into a rotating convection oven.

``When you first start making them, when you close your eyes at night, you see red spots,'' Skinner says.

If you wonder where all those fruitcakes go, check the Internet, where a search turns up more than 8,000 references. Among them is a series posted by Micheal Stinson of Boulder, Colo., a cartoonist in search of a publisher.

Stinson suggests that fruitcake was invented by the Druids when they built Fruitcake Henge.

``I've always been afraid that if I got this thing published, I'd start getting fruitcakes in the mail,'' Stinson said. ``But that would be OK, because I could build a spare bedroom. Just throw them together with a little drywall paste.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) Dione Skinner mixes fruitcake at a Medford, Ore., bakery.

(2--Color) Nancy Tait slices into a popular mail-order fruitcake.

Associated Press