by Steve Almond
We caught Roman, the head cook, in the midst of making a batch of marshmallow filling. On the table were six Tupperware bowls filled with pan-dried egg whites, which were being rehydrated—in distilled water, naturally. A large, gentle man with mournful eyes, Roman moved with superlative grace as he carried the egg whites across the room and poured them into a large mixer. In a matter of minutes, they were whipped into a snow-white meringue. Meanwhile, Roman prepared a concoction of corn syrup, sugar, salt, and vanilla, which he lugged over to a second mixer. The scent of bourbon vanilla suffused the room.
“This mixer is called a Hobart,” Russ said. “I was using one of these when we first started and it broke down. I called the manufacturer to see if I could get the part I needed and they said, ‘We haven’t made parts for that since the fifties. What are you doing with that thing?’ I said, ‘I’m using it to make candy.’ They couldn’t believe it.”
Roman turned the Hobart on and slowly eased the speed up. Then he went and got the egg whites and carefully folded them into the vanilla mixture. The result was a satiny white liquid that lipped over the edge of the bowl with every rotation of the blades but never quite spilled. The whole process looked deceptively simple. But that was how it often was with candy production. The perils were hidden. “You can’t expose the egg whites to too much heat or they’ll coagulate,” Russ explained. “The other thing you have to watch for, if you try to speed up that mixer too quick you wind up covered in marshmallow. We learned that one the hard way.”
Roman nodded. He returned to the table with the egg whites and bent down to record the details of the batch he’d just finished—not on a computer, but in a dog-eared business ledger.
I had never seen a cup candy being manufactured, though I had spent a good deal of time admiring the crinkled ridges of chocolate and thin walls and pondering how in the hell an automated machine could produce such an elegant shape. What happened was this: A depositor plinked liquid chocolate into each of the brown glassine cups. These cups then passed under a row of brass pipes, which let out a sharp burst of air, blowing the chocolate up and onto the sides of the paper cup. (It was the sound of this process that produced the distinctive hiss and ping I’d heard earlier.) The cups were blasted with cold air again, to solidify the chocolate. A foot later, the marshmallow syrup was deposited into the cups, coiling down snakelike and settling flat. Then, get this, another plink of chocolate was released onto the (now full) cup, producing a chocolate and marshmallow yin/yang design. I should mention that the young fire inspector was fascinated by this process. He spent a good two minutes watching the liquid chocolate rise up into the sides of the cup, a gorgeous sight to be sure, though probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a major fire risk.
But how, you might fairly ask, did this yin/yang design transform itself into a finished Valomilk? The answer was diabolically simple.
“We shake them,” Russ said.
He led me into the next room, where workers were removing each rack of molds and shaking them in a distinct circular motion, so that the top layer of chocolate oozed down and around and connected to the rest of the cup. It was a process that didn’t look that hard—imagine hula-hooping with a metal rack in your hands—until you considered that the chocolate only stayed liquid for a minute or so and that you had to worry about 30 different cups and make sure that all of them, no matter where they were positioned on the rack, got full chocolate coverage. If you allowed the chocolate to seep too far in any one direction, you were screwed. I stood and watched one woman tip the rack first one way, then the other, applying a gentle shake at fixed intervals, so as to coax the chocolate into place. The image called to mind the waning of 30 tiny, gibbous moons.
“When we first started doing this, it was a real mess,” Russ said. “We had a ton of leakers. Of the three batches we tried, only one of them came out right.”
There was no room for a cooling tunnel in the factory, so Russ had been forced to improvise, using a large, standing fan to blow cool air through the racks.
That was the whole process. The cups, once cooled, were set on a tiny conveyor belt and shuttled, two at a time, onto a strip of cardboard, which was then heat-sealed in an elegant plastic wrapper, a method of wrapping that went out of vogue more than three decades ago. “What I’ve done, basically, is taken our technology backwards. Most of this stuff is somewhere between forties and fifties technology. I spent weeks trying to imagine how to set up the factory. And when I got stuck, I asked myself: ‘Now, how would my grandfather have done this?’ ”
Russ then asked me the question I was afraid he was going to ask me: Had I ever actually eaten a Valomilk?
I shook my head.
He squinted in distress, grabbed a freshly wrapped pack, and pressed it into my hands.
THE MARSHMALLOW PARALLAX
The truth is I’m not a huge fan of marshmallow. In fact, I sort of hate marshmallow. What I was hoping would happen is that I’d be able to slip the candy bar into my pocket and eat it later. But Russ led me back to his office and sat down and folded his arms across his chest. His expression was unmistakably smug. He looked like a major cocaine lord waiting for a new buyer to sample his goods. (Not that I am intimately familiar with the facial expressions of major cocaine lords.)
As I bit down into my first cup, I immediately understood why: the interplay of the chocolate and the vanilla syrup was astonishing. Until that moment, I had never understood the synergy between these two flavors. The pairing had just been a trope, to my mind, a cliché. But here, inside my mouth, it was finally dawning on me: the way in which the airy tones of vanilla infused the chocolate and lent the heavy tang of cocoa a sense of buoyancy. What I realized in that moment was this: it wasn’t the flavor of marshmallow that bothered me so much as the texture, that fluffy, half-empty springiness. But the Valomilk filling was really more like the gooey center of a toasted marshmallow, though that’s not quite right either, because the vanilla in a Valomilk is far more pungent than any mainstream marshmallow.
“The way we designed it is that you start with this burst of chocolate,” Russ said. “Then you hit the filling and it’s so sweet that it sort of overwhelms you for a while. Then the chocolate reemerges at the end and it gives the bar a great finish.”
The only problem with the Valomilk involved what I want to call oral logistics. It was the single most difficult-to-eat candy bar I had ever encountered. No sooner had I taken my first bite, than the entire cup collapsed and the filling began to drip everywhere: onto the wrapper, onto my sweater, and, most prominently, onto my chin.
Russ chuckled. “You know the motto they used for Valomilk? When It Runs Down Your Chin, You Know It’s a Valomilk. I did a lot of trade shows back when I was getting the business back up and running and I remember I was up in Topeka and these two women came to my booth. ‘Oh, Valomilks!’ one of them said. ‘I remember those! They were like a little taste of heaven.’ And the whole time she was talking to me, she was doing this thing.” Russ began to rub at his chin absently. “She had no idea she was doing it. It was her memory that set it off.”
This was all fine and well, but I was in a bit of a crisis, sweaterwise. So I took the entire cup, the sharded remains anyway, and shoveled them into my mouth.
I attacked the second cup more carefully, breaking off a portion of the chocolate lid and sipping at the syrup, demitasse style. Then, when Russ went off to say hello to his secretary, Mildred, I broke off the rest of the lid and used it like a tortilla chip to dip into the syrup. Then I went straight at the syrup with my finger. When I was left with just a film of filling, I popped the cup into my mouth.
Russ came back into his office. He took one look at me and got me a Kleenex and a bottle of water.
“Once you take that first bite, it’s pretty much crisis management,” Russ said. “I get mail all the time from people asking the right way to eat a Valomilk. I had one woman who wrote to tell me I almost caused her to have a car accident. She was tryi
ng to eat one while driving, which I don’t recommend. She said she pulled over to the side of the road and while she was pulled over she ate the other cup, which she was supposed to be taking home to her husband. So then she had to turn around and go buy another one. My college roommate, Mark Dempsey, used to eat four, chased by a Diet Coke. Had one guy who worked at an auto salvage place who wrote to tell me my candy bar had almost ruined his cash register. I asked my daughter Sarah about this once, because she was studying child psychology. I said, ‘Why are people so fascinated by how to eat Valomilks?’ She said, ‘Well, Dad, they’re round and they’re messy. But that’s what makes them fun. Once we get older we’re not supposed to be messy anymore. But for one moment when you’re eating a Valomilk, it’s okay to be messy again.’ ”
It goes without saying that I explored a number of methods, using the supply of Valomilks Russ later foisted upon me, including but not limited to:
The Pin Prick: Using the end of a relatively clean paper clip, I bored a hole in the bottom of the cup and let the syrup drip down into my mouth.
The Flip Top: I broke off the top lid, in its entirety, and lapped at the filling with my tongue directly.
The Glutton: Whole cup into my mouth. (Not recommended for diabetics.)
In a sense, the Valomilk is as antiestablishment as a candy bar can get. In recent years, the Big Three have sought ways to make the consumption of candy more and more convenient. They’ve come up with an endless variety of bite-size pieces, most individually wrapped. In so doing they’ve not just clogged the nation’s landfills, but bled the act of candy consumption of its inherent, regressive joys. There is little sense of improvisation, let alone danger, when a piece of candy comes ready to eat.
The inconvenience of the Valomilk wasn’t limited to consumption issues. It was also hard to transport. For one thing, Russ shipped his candy via UPS, in quantities usually no greater than a gross. He couldn’t afford refrigerated trucks, so he was reluctant to ship anyplace where the temperature was likely to exceed 80 degrees. During the warm months, he watched the Weather Channel before coming into work and made a daily map of acceptable shipment sites. Finally Valo -milks explode at high altitude.
“Well, they don’t explode exactly,” Russ said. “I just use that word to make it sound dramatic. But the filling does expand and they leak. The ones that don’t have a leak already become little leakers and the little leakers become super leakers. You can’t take them over the Rockies, or on a plane.” Russ did not mention these limitations with any great measure of frustration. These were simply the radical conditions of doing business in the way he did. (I, however, am ready to express a certain measure of frustration, because I was left with no choice but to transport my box of Valomilks over the Rockies by plane, not once, but twice. By the time I got home, each and every one of the cups had sprung a leak and the filling had congealed into a Krazy Glue–like substance capable of great binding force, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, to remove a Valomilk from its paper cup. Not that this kept me from trying.)
Clearly, Russ Sifers considered candy a calling. But there had also been an element of chance behind his decision to start making Valomilks again. In 1985, he was driving to Manhattan, Kansas, for a parents’ weekend at Kansas State, when a local radio host began talking about Valomilks. Russ listened in amazement as caller after caller lamented their disappearance. This was the era before cell phones, so he couldn’t call the show, but he did write a letter, which the host read on the air the next week. This spurred another flood of calls. “I’d grown up around Valomilks and always kind of taken them for granted,” Russ said. “This was the first time I’d realized how special they were to people.”
Russ was working on the assembly line at GM at the time, but he continued to mull the idea of reviving Valomilks, even going so far as to present some handmade samples at a local chocolate festival. He didn’t get serious until a couple of years later, when the absentee owners asked him if he’d be willing to clean out the old downtown factory, which they wanted to sell. Russ went by with a flashlight to scout it out. He found all the old equipment, still there in the coal room in the basement. “I had the strangest feeling looking at those machines,” he said. “ ‘That’s the stuff my grandfather used! There’s the chocolate melter! I kind of remember I had to step up on a stool to see into that!” Russ knew GM was planning a round of layoffs, that the getting was good. All his kids had gone through college. His mission suddenly seemed obvious.
He agreed to clean up the building if he could keep the old equipment and the rights to the Sifers Valomilk name. He even got himself transferred to the night shift at GM so he could spend his days planning the relaunch. There were a hundred things to consider: how to rehab the equipment, where to find factory space, if the old recipes could even be reproduced.
“The first batch of filling nearly caused a divorce,” Russ said. “My wife and I were making it in our kitchen and she said, ‘How many cups of sugar should I put in?’ I said, ‘Well now, it was 200 pounds of corn syrup, 100 pounds of sugar.’ She said, ‘How many cups, Russ?’ We about killed one another.”
The chocolate was also a problem. The original Valomilks were made with a special chocolate bought from Hershey’s called Sifers Triple A, a slightly darker milk chocolate, specially blended for creaminess. Russ contacted Hershey’s to try to get the recipe. The call went unreturned. So he did what any obsessive would: he commissioned a local chocolatier to reproduce Sifers Triple A. To make sure he was getting the taste just right, he tracked down people who had eaten the bar in the thirties and began conducting independent taste tests with each of them. It took weeks for the tasters to concur that Russ had re-created the original recipe. He was right to be so thorough. The chocolate in the Valomilk was transcendent; I would go so far as to call it velvety.
After more than two years of concerted scheming, Russ began production. He liked to point out that he moved from the largest corporation in the world to the smallest, a true statement given that he didn’t have any actual employees at inception. He had to beg folks to come in and work as volunteers after church, and pay them in rejects. Russ was so excited when he finished the first two boxes that he raced down to the distributor and announced, “Here they are! The Valomilks have arrived!” The distributor stared at him and asked for an invoice. “Oh yeah,” Russ said, “I have to bill you for these, don’t I?”
He soon began seeking distribution outside Kansas City. “One day I told my wife, ‘I’ve got six cases and I’m not coming back till they’re all sold.’ That was two days’ production back then.” Russ drove from Lawrence to Topeka to Hutchinson and sold all six cases in one day. It turned out the distributors who had worked with his father and grandfather were happy to help. He sent a price sheet to one fellow in Missouri who called him back and agreed to stock Valomilks in his warehouses, all across the state. Russ hoped to make Valomilks available in every midwestern town; in the first, heady months of the business, this had seemed realistic.
It no longer does. “We can’t do it,” he told me. “Wal-Mart and Kmart and Targetmart and Whatevermart, they’re in control of the marketplace. Take a place like Maryville, Missouri. There used to be four groceries in Maryville. Then Wal-Mart announced they were building a supercenter, 160,000 square feet. In a single year, three of those groceries have gone under and the last one’s on the ropes. Now: I can’t get into Wal-Mart. People still want Valomilks, but they’re killing off the avenues we have to get our candy out there.” Russ noted, with considerable disgust, that he’d been asked to pay $20,000 as a slotting fee by the Associated Wholesale Grocers. He was unable to.
As I listened to Russ, I could see my dream of a bunch of small, independent microconfectioners crumbling. The mass production of a candy bar required a huge initial investment with little chance of large-scale retail sales. Russ, after all, already had an established brand name. He knew the business. He’d gotten his equipment for free. And still, he was str
uggling.
“People say to me, ‘Hey Russ, how’s business doing?’ I say, ‘Better than Enron. Better than Worldcom.’ What else am I going to say? I had some guy come in and try to sell me a business consulting plan. I said, ‘I know we need more sales. I know we need to get in more stores. And I know those stores are disappearing.’ I know the distributors are disappearing, too. I read their obituaries. Those are people who sold to my father and my grandfather. They’re like a death in the family. And I’ve had enough of those.” For a second, I didn’t understand what Russ meant. Then I remembered something he’d told me earlier, in the factory, that his oldest daughter had succumbed to cancer in 1999.
From the next room, I could hear Mildred whacking at the keys of her electric typewriter. One of the workers appeared in the doorway, and Russ, lodged in an uncustomary silence, looked relieved at the interruption.
“How’d we do with the fire inspector?” he asked.
“Passed,” the young man said.
Russ smiled. “This is Dave, our factory manager. He also happens to be my stepson Dave Swiercinsky. You’re looking at the fifth generation.”
Dave blushed a little.
“When the time comes, he’ll inherit this desk,” Russ announced. “In a sense, I view myself as a steward. That’s a biblical term. It just means a caretaker. I don’t really own the company. I’m just a caretaker. And when it comes time for me to move on, then Dave can take care of it.”