The following is a guest blog post by Rebecca Sharpless, author of Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, which is available now everywhere books are sold. This year, I decided to make a fruitcake. Only a few people confess to actually liking fruitcake. Its density and the frequent use of a bitter fruit called citron make them suspicious. The most stinging indictment of fruitcake came in 1989 from Johnny Carson, who showed it as indestructible even under atomic attack. But, for more than half a millennium, fruitcake has persisted—I mean as a...