UNLIKE THANKSGIVING'S TURKEY (or tofurkey) fest, the December holidays are more about the larder than the dinner table. This is the season of the cocktail party, the buffet; of late-afternoon teatimes and hot toddies, mugs of something steamy and sweet to take the chill off. And best of all, fruitcake.

Oh, you laugh. But not when you take a bite of June Taylor's handmade fruitcake, made in season and wrapped in thick letterpress-printed paper. Taylor, who is English and thus has a good-fruitcake gene that most Americans lack, is best known for her stupendous jams, but at this time of year I have to have one of her elegant, moist little cakes, which are available at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market or through her Web site, www.junetaylorjams.com. I always pay with the virtuous feeling that I'm buying a gift for someone else. Then I get it home, and I remember how almost everyone I know recoils in green-cherry horror from the very idea of fruitcake. And then one day in mid December, on a chilly late afternoon after a long walk, when there are presents to wrap, the cinnamon-and-orange-spiked tea gets scooped from its tin, the fruitcake gets unwrapped, and steaming cup in hand, the nostalgic flavors of the holidays roll over my tongue. Actually, of course, since I grew up Jewish in New Jersey, fruitcake didn't make up any part of December. But I read a lot of English novels. And when I finally did have good fruitcake, on a sunny, perfect English summer day at an outdoor tea party at Harrow, I was smitten for life.

One thing I haven't done, at least not successfully, is to make my own. Every cook and reader I know views the Jamaican black cake described with such single-minded verve by Laurie Colwin at the end of her Home Cooking as a personal grail. Colwin published the recipe of a Jamaican friend, freely admitting she'd never actually made it. Although Colwin died in 1992, the topic is everlasting: does the recipe work? Colwin makes the black cake sound so indescribably delicious that you cannot not want to taste it, even if it takes a month to make and calls for pounds and pounds of dried fruit and candied citrus peel, macerated for weeks in a whole bottle of sweet kosher wine and another one of rum. It also calls for cooking a pound of brown sugar with a little water until it "begins to turn black." She then goes on to specify, unhelpfully, "You do not want to overboil. It should be only slightly bitter, black and definitely burnt." This seems like one of those directions that only makes sense when someone is hanging over your shoulder telling you what to do. How burnt is a little burnt? How much black is good, and how much more black is throw-it-out? The alternative is burnt sugar essence, a magical West Indian ingredient I have never, ever been able to find. Long annual threads on this very topic trail through food bulletin boards like Chowhound.com at this time of year; you can hear the longing in the begging questions.

But why this recipe? Plenty of food writers make extravagant claims for this brownie recipe or that mac-and-cheese technique. A whole magazine, Cooks Illustrated, is predicated on the fact that science trumps tradition, and if you treat the kitchen like a lab and keep making the same recipe, varying one ingredient or technique each time, you will eventually come up with the single best way to make pancakes or chicken cacciatore. Not that it isn't fun to read Cooks Illustrated; it's fun the way reading about polar exploration in the days before Vitamin C pills and Gore-Tex is fun: because someone else is doing all the hard work. But actually, for all of Cooks Illustrated's self-righteousness, there's no such thing as a perfect recipe. What Colwin's piece speaks to is a more universal wish: safe home, warm hearth, extended families full of love, cross-cultural gifts that are generously given and generously received. That's a lot of freight for even the notoriously bricklike fruitcake to carry.

But black cake, or fruit cake, isn't the only food to carry the promise of holiday cheer. A bowl of brilliant orange clementines is a harbinger of the snappy winter season. The little spray of sharp-scented oil that pops off the skin when you peel it back is the smell of December in California for me. Last year, just before New Year's, wandering the aisles of Carrefour (imagine a Europeanized, two-level superstore: Target on the top, Andronico's on the bottom) in Bologna, Italy, I found football-helmet-size boxes of pannetone, the traditional Italian Christmas bread, marked down to a euro apiece. Of course, we had to buy one, and toasted, it became our New Year's breakfast. This year I'm thinking about pannetone French toast. During the holidays, shopping, rather than cooking, becomes the fun part. Those little star-shaped, chocolate-dipped German cookies and their fat, round, spicy cousins are worth a trip to the Cost Plus at Fisherman's Wharf, which is surprisingly packed with great round-the-world holiday food treats at this time of year. And for slow sipping from a small glass, eggnog from Straus Family Creamery, lush and creamy like the women in an Ingres painting. Like, alas, most fruitcake, most eggnog is revolting, a simpering mess of thickeners and gums and fake rum flavorings. Straus's version is pale and subtle, lovely on its own or bolstered with a shot of rum or brandy. Homemade eggnog, for those who can deal with raw eggs, is lavish and astonishing; recipes for it can still be found in old editions of everything-and-more cookbooks like the Joy of Cooking.