My husband and I were driving east on the Long Island Expressway early last December, heading for a holiday weekend with old friends. I was reading Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory aloud, a ritual we share every year around this time, hoping to set the right tone and mood for the season. The story always chokes me up. Because I am shy about being emotional, I kept my head down, my hair hiding my face, as I read. Sure enough, tears soon welled up in my eyes, and my voice got all funny. Then, a strangled little sob slipped out.

Capote wasn't exactly one to write a sentimental tearjerker—and he didn't do so here. But his memoir of making fruitcakes with his elderly cousin in rural Alabama, sharing the excitement of Christmas with her, is so rich in texture and emotion, so true, that it's heartrending in spite of itself.

Every year, just after Thanksgiving, writes Capote, his cousin would wake up and officially announce, "It's fruitcake weather!" Out would come the fruitcake fund, a year's collection of dimes and nickels, and off the two friends would go to collect the ingredients: candied fruits—cherries, citron, ginger, canned pineapple, raisins—vanilla and other spices, butter, and walnuts. They'd pay a visit to Mr. HaHa Jones, the local bootlegger, for the all-important whiskey. Once the ingredients were gathered, Capote and his cousin would head home to the kitchen where a big, black stove glowed. "Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar," Capote writes, "vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen…." I feel like I'm right there with them, sharing their delight in the exotic, jewel-like fruits, the mysterious spices, the sinful whiskey.

In describing the smells, the excitement, and the atmosphere of love in the kitchen, Capote reveals—perhaps even more than he intended to—how deeply the innocent ritual touched him. These moments may well have been as important to him as any of the heady high points of his famous life. Why does Capote's story mean so much to me? Surely it's not just that I truly like fruitcake, and look forward to making it myself each year. Maybe it's because this tale is so much about the sensual pleasures of food, and about the intimacy that cooking encourages.

Now, I know that fruitcake is not everybody's cup of tea. People often dread it as inevitably heavy and lumpy—more doorstop than delicacy. Russell Baker claims that his own distaste for it stems from "a Christmas dinner when, at the age of 15, I dropped a small piece of fruitcake and shattered every bone in my right foot." Why, you may ask, couldn't little Truman and his cousin have been whipping up cookies or divinity fudge instead? Because it just wouldn't have been the same. Because fruitcake is as much about the gathering of ingredients, the making of the thing, and the giving of it, as it is about eating (though fruitcake can be delicious—honest).