By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 24, 2006; D01

This fruitcake is for the doctor -- the good doctor, the important doctor, the doctor worth keeping close and happy.

So he's getting fruitcake. Five pounds of Hyde family fruitcake. A dense round loaf crusted with pecans -- all hand-chopped.

The cake has been, for the last three months, aging in Daill Day Hyde's Vienna kitchen, wrapped in old, torn-up sheets, awaiting regular dousings of straight Bacardi rum.

Another drizzle is about to happen. The fruitcake needs it. Hyde can hear it.

"She listens to them," says Laine Hyde, Daill's older sister and fellow member of the fruitcake cult. "Literally."

"I do!" Daill agrees. The secret is squeezing the cakes, waiting for them to "make a sound. It goes," she whispers, quiet as cashmere, "shh sh."

Since early October, this 58-year-old who spends her days in a Fairfax law office and her autumns "nursing" fruitcakes has been doing just that with the 56 cakes she and Laine made this year -- these homemade confections of raisins, dates, figs, pecans, cherries, pineapple, lemon peel, orange peel, citron, rum, flour, eggs, brown sugar, butter, mace and orange juice.

Oh, the lowly fruitcake, more Christmas trick than treat, more doorstop than delectable. Who are these fruitcake lovers, these delusionists who see the world through maraschino-colored glasses?

(Maraschinos? they respond, with hauteur and outrage. Banish the thought! Nearly all of American's fruitcake fanatics -- and they are out there, dotted across the country, although their numbers are nowhere near as densely packed as the fruits in their finest cakes -- would get all stirred up at the comparison: No artificial flavors, no neon colors in these concoctions. The analogy crumbles like a Walgreens fruitcake undergoing the knife.)

The Hyde sisters say theirs is a partnership that keeps alive a family tradition, a top-secret recipe that goes back six generations. They still make their cakes in the old baby bathtub used by their mother and grandmother.

To the rest of the fruitcake-eschewing world, though, theirs seems more like a partnership in a Christmas crime.

But when you go to Trader Joe's and they're all out of pecan halves and filberts? That could just be the work of the fruitcake coven. We'll never know for sure.

Theresa Slowik, a Capitol Hill denizen, stocked up on her ingredients before Thanksgiving for this year's Christmas confection. Hers involves apricots, ginger, cherries, figs, raisins, currants, lemon and orange peel, pineapple and frequent baptisms with brandy.

"My in-laws are coming," explains this 50-something woman who works for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "This has alcohol in it. They're going to be here for two weeks."

Yes, there are definite spiked-punchy possibilities with fruitcake. There are, though, even more punch-line possibilities. Eavesdrop on foodie chat groups online, and you'll hear doubters who mention fruitcake only to giggle about the fruitcakes who love them. Here and there is the spirited defense from a fruitcake missionary. "Damsel" speaks up on their behalf, proclaiming: "My mom made wonderful fruitcake. I think it's like liver or Miracle Whip. Either you love it or you hate it."

Responds "Serene": "If fruitcake is like liver or Miracle Whip, you're doing it wrong."

And though CoffeeCakes.com may be selling several kinds of fruitcakes, including a type made by monks -- "and one thing I can say about the monks' is," says the company's VP of operations, Diane OKunewick, "they've got good booze" -- the online company isn't selling a lot of them.

And they can't compare to the company's namesake coffeecakes. "We sell thousands of our coffeecakes," gushes OKunewick. "We gets trucks weekly of our coffeecakes." But fruitcakes? Maybe they'll sell 300, and many of those will be, OKunewick says, "gag gifts."

No respect. The poor fruitcake gets no respect. And in Manitou Springs, Colo., home of next year's 12th annual Great Fruitcake Toss, it gets even less.

"Eat it? I'd rather shoot it," says Joe Carberry, one of the four Boeing GPS engineers who make up Team Omega, the contest's four-time record holders for launching fruitcakes.

On Jan. 6, they will be joining a few hundred other fruitcake hurlers (which is defined, here, in the "projectile" sense of the word, not in the editorial-comment-on-the-dessert-itself sense of the word) and as many as a thousand fruitcake spectators, and the team will be trying to best its all-time record of shooting a fruitcake 1,214 feet.

The team uses a "smoking gun," a pneumatic device powered by a thrift-store exercise bike they purchased for $7.49. When designing the contraption, these experts in, for example, such sciences as aerodynamics busied themselves with concerns like simple ballistics, optimal trajectory angle and "the drag coefficient for a fruitcake."

They debuted in 2002 with slingshots. By 2005, they'd come up with the smoking gun and overshot the entire Fruitcake Toss venue, eliciting phone calls to the police about "fruitcakes raining" in a distant neighborhood.

"One fruitcake we recovered was in someone's back yard," says Team Omega's Jack Taylor, "and we had to fight a dog for it."

"We're pretty efficient at disposing of fruitcake," Carberry says, "really far, far away."

Daill Day Hyde understands the impulse. Store-bought fruitcakes are "commercial," she says. "Like a candied fruit in a strong glue." She keeps in her desk drawer an old Edward Gorey Christmas card of people lined up on a frozen lake, waiting to drop their fruitcake into a hole in the ice.

But her Hyde Family Old English Fruitcake is a far superior sweetmeat: It is powerful and rich -- each one-pound loaf is the size of a small banana bread and packs a walloping 3,600 calories; it should be sliced paper thin. It is also so delicate that, in certain bites, you can taste the individual seeds of the figs.

"I have had people well up in tears," she says, "saying, 'I never thought I'd try this again. My grandma used to make this.' "

For fruitcake really is about the power of memory. Jennifer Ann Mulhollan Ridout is a Texarkana, Tex., pathologist who may be up to her elbows this season in James Beard's Mother's Black Fruitcake, but, she says, "I hated fruitcakes when I was young. Fruitcakes were horrible. They were medicinal."

They were to be disdained, until the day when Ridout was about 10 years old, and her Italian grandmother's sideboard, "a massive thing of tiger oak," arrived at her South Texas home. Impressed and entranced, Ridout started tugging on the big crystal knobs of the sideboard's drawers and cabinets, until she opened one and discovered "the fabulously complex scent of sherry and candied fruit."

It was where her grandmother, Teresa Torzillo Messina, had kept her fruitcakes.

Now keep in mind, Ridout says, that this was in the early 1960s. Her grandmother had died in 1934. There had been no fruitcakes stored in there for "many, many years."

"It was almost as if," she continues, "this tiny little woman, whom I had never known, had penned a love letter to grandchildren she would never know -- and that she had chosen to do it with fruitcake."