Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  During all this activity, an elderly gentleman in a dark blazer and necktie had appeared at the top of the stairs. He stood, patiently waiting for Dave to notice him.

  “Machine broke?” he said, after a time.

  Dave turned and nodded. He introduced his father—“The guy who got me into all this”—and went back to inspecting the mogul with Greg.

  John Wagers was a soft-spoken, solidly built man in the Jack Kemp mold. His official title was Chairman of the Board. Although he was supposed to be retired, he conceded, a bit sheepishly, that he still came out to the factory most days, to see what his youngest son was up to.

  For most of his life, John Wagers had been an accountant. In 1982, he sold his practice and semiretired. He was, in his own words, “just puttering around” when a friend approached him about the prospect of buying Idaho Candy. (The purchase price included a snack distribution business, as well.) Three weeks later John, who knew nothing about the candy industry, was the owner.

  In a sense, he was carrying on a company tradition. The founder, T. O. Smith, had moved to Boise in 1900 not to make candy, but to build a hotel. Once the hotel was finished he, too, found himself at loose ends. A former confectioner, he started making candy out of his garage and selling it door-todoor.

  John described Smith as “a real visionary in the candy world” who invented more than 100 different candies in his lifetime. The Spud came along in 1926. “Would you like to see some of the molds Smith used?” John said. He led me to a shelf tucked away in the far corner of the room and, with a tremendous delicacy, as if handling Picasso’s paintbrushes, removed one rack of molds after another. They were lovely: rows of scalloped shells, pyramids, gumdrops. “This one’s my favorite,” John said. “Elephants. Will you look at that? Elephants.”

  John had been charged with overseeing the production of a new set of molds for the Spuds and another candy bar, the Old Faithful. Dave had gotten the idea of making new molds after running into his old shop teacher from junior high. He was paying a bunch of thirteen-year-old burnouts, in other words, to make his new molds. This struck me as something Mars would not do.

  Idaho Candy produced a third bar called the Cherry Cocktail, which looked quite similar to the Twin Bing. The difference, John explained, was that he and Dave used a real chocolate coating, and put real cherries inside. This was done by hand. He went into great and loving detail about the use of inverted sugar in the fondant, because this ingredient was what allowed the fondant to liquefy after the chocolate coating had been applied. “What you want, you see, is a filling that’s juicy and delicious,” John said.

  Behind us, the mogul chugged to life.

  “Looks like you fixed it,” John called over to his son.

  Dave shrugged. “We had to move the timing chain one link. My lucky day.”

  “It’s not luck,” John said.

  “Right now it’s luck, Dad.”

  “I was telling this young man about the new molds,” John said.

  It was funny to watch the old fellow, this former accountant with dabs of cornstarch on the cuffs of his fancy blazer. He was still puttering around, in a sense. But his props were much more interesting now. He pulled his son aside to discuss a private matter. Greg and the rest of the cook crew went back to their routine, sliding buckets across the floor, wheeling racks of wet Spuds through the slender shafts of sunlight.

  I was the only one, therefore, to see what happened next, which was that the grayish brown liquid Spud began gurgling over the sides of the depositor. My initial thought was: How interesting! The filling is bubbling over! I wonder how this is supposed to work? It was when the liquid Spud starting to drip down onto the control panel that I realized I was witnessing a major malfunction.

  “I think,” I said, “should that be …” Thick sheets of the gluey stuff had, by now, enveloped the nozzles and hoses below. I thought, absurdly, of Dr. Seuss: a world awash in Oobleck. “There seems to be a problem—”

  Greg looked up and shouted something unintelligible and Dave and his father wheeled around and then both Dave and Greg were leaping for the big red button on the control panel. The machine ground to a halt. For a few moments, the only sound was the soft glottal slurp of liquid Spud dripping onto and off of steel fixtures.

  “Shit,” Dave said thoughtfully.

  I immediately began apologizing. I felt I had caused this di -saster. My presence had been a distraction, I had failed to say something sooner.

  Dave shook his head. “This happened before.”

  “Third time this week,” Greg said. “Anyway, you should have seen the old mogul. I had that thing held together with Band-Aids and duct tape.”

  This was supposed to be a disaster, a minor one anyway. But no one was treating it as a disaster. We were all just staring at the mogul, watching the strings of Spud rill down the bright metal. It was quite beautiful, actually, the sort of tableau one might expect to find in an East Village art gallery, a testament to the enduring fallibility of technology. Machines depended on men. They could still break down in the loveliest of ways. What struck me as most enchanting was the sense of executive engagement in the manufacturing process. The president of Idaho Candy wasn’t tucked away in some swank office reviewing marketing studies while some underpaid drone did the dirty work. He was elbow deep in Spud, just as T. O. Smith would have been a century before. And more than this, he wanted to be elbow deep in Spud, spattered in cornstarch, his fingertips perfumed with the strange sea scent of ager ager. This is what a candymaker did! He worked with ingredients, dove into the sweet muck of invention, jerked the necessary timing chains. The fact that something had gone wrong wasn’t a cause for panic or despondence, but, in some manner, for celebration. What joy would there be in a world without adversity? I even got Dave and his dad to pose for a picture in front of the spill. Sure. What the heck? They didn’t mind.

  HUCKLEBERRY, HOUNDED

  Later, Dave led me down to the second floor. Idaho Candy was a general merchandising house, much like Palmer Candy, though the organizational scheme of the factory was way more free-form. The central visual component of the second floor, for instance, was a pair of long white cooling tables scattered with several thousand bright green … somethings. A thick effluvium of vanilla wafted about.

  Dave picked up a handful and popped them into his mouth.

  “These are practically my favorite things we make,” he said. “Burnt peanuts.”

  Actually, they were roasted peanuts in a sugar and vanilla coating, and they were, as billed, mindblowingly delicious.

  “Right?” Dave said. He took another handful.

  “How do you get them to look like this?”

  The coating was composed of dozens of tiny little beads.

  “That’s a pebbling effect,” Dave said. “We add salt when they go in the pan and the sugar gathers around the salt granules.”

  In the back of the room, a worker was making a batch of red peanuts, ladling a syrup that looked like movie blood into a roaring panning machine. The two colors would later be combined to make a Christmas mix. The room smelled like a Chinese restaurant, owing to the warm exhaust pumping out of the peanut roaster.

  What Dave really wanted to show me, though, was a new product called the Huckleberry Imperial. I was familiar, if vaguely, with Huckleberry Hound. But I was not aware that there was such a thing as an actual huckleberry. There was. It was the state fruit of Idaho, a small, fragrant purple berry. The Huckleberry Imperial was a small purple hard candy, something like a cinnamon red hot. Dave ransacked the various shelves and boxes in the panning department, and ran downstairs to check one other place. Alas, he was unable to find a Huckleberry Imperial. In the end, I had to settle for a somewhat aged pillow candy, which still managed to convey a sense of the huckleberry gestalt: similar to a boysenberry, but fruitier, more intense. There were other products Dave wanted me to try, including the storied Chicken Bone, a crunchy peanut-butter stick of the Chick-o-Stick genus, along
with a piquant horehound hard candy based on the tea, and something called Peco Brittle, which involved large coconut shavings. (I shan’t dwell.) But the piece that made Dave get all misty-eyed was his Owyhee Butter Toffee. He’d done some major work with this toffee, upgrading the quality of the piece and designing a new box. We tromped to the front of the building, where a half dozen women were dipping pieces of the toffee in a thin marshmallow paste and rolling them in crushed almonds.

  Let me say this about Owyhee Butter Toffee: if you are one of those people who views butter as the high point of western culinary achievement, as I do, track down some of this stuff. It was like sucking on a sugar cube sautéed in butter, only much much smoother. (The piece was 17 percent butter; my initial estimate had been 87 percent.) Dave also insisted I try one of his new creations: a cashew brittle covered in dark chocolate. This was basically the Platonic ideal of a Heath bar. Each bite delivered a rich, slightly bitter surge of cocoa, sweetened by the toffee, and slowly relented to a mellow cashew afterburn. So Dave wasn’t just the guy who fixed the machines. He had also caught the bug of invention. And he was good. He had a knack for blending flavors and textures. He understood—like any freak alchemist—that a truly special piece of candy should surprise and enthrall the mouth, should be both intuitive and revolutionary. (Side note: I later had to physically restrain myself from stealing a box of the cashew brittle.)

  The second floor was crowded with older equipment: brass drop molds, a batch roller that dated back to World War I, a row of fearsome-looking antique candy cutters. Dave seemed endlessly fascinated by this stuff, and I couldn’t really blame him. It is one of the few privileges of modernity to regard the innovations of the recent past as quaint, rather than barbaric. But they are more than quaint. They are reminders of the era when men and machines worked in concert to produce objects, before technology became mysterious and abstract, a series of ones and zeros floating above us in the stratosphere, or hidden away in circuit boards and servers. And Dave, bless his Luddite heart, had no great ambitions to modernize the factory. His cooling system for hard candies, for example, was composed of air hoses attached to the underside of a slender steel canopy. It looked like someone had laid out the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz .

  Dave insisted I try another new product, the Spud Bite. I had feared this moment would come eventually. A finished Spud includes not just the queer discolored tofu-marshmallow, but a coating of chocolate rolled in … coconut. The Bite tasted a lot better than I thought it would, though. And I’m not just saying that in the hopes that Dave will send me a free box of Owyhee Butter Toffee, though obviously, I would not turn away such generosity. No, I liked the Spud Bite. The coconut was of the medium-dry variety, meaning that it didn’t have that creepy cuticle texture. It was, instead, pleasantly crunchy. The bite contained 40 percent more chocolate than its full-size cousin (Dave had done the math) and this helped sharpen up the mellow maple flavor of the filling. There was, I am further pleased to report, no seaweed aftertaste.

  Down in the dim basement, a gruff gentleman named Gary was keeping watch over the company’s enrober. The Spud fillings were set onto a conveyor belt and sent chugging into a familiar curtain of chocolate, after which they passed under a machine called a coconut depositor—second only to the nut applicator in my patheon of favorite freak appliances—which snowed flakes onto the still-wet chocolate.

  “That’s probably the only coconut depositor in operation in the entire United States of America,” Gary said. “I’ve been with Idaho for 34 years, and it came in just before I got here. Up till then the Spuds used to come off the back end and drop into a big slab of coconut and the girls would roll them around in there and put them into the cooling tunnel.”

  Back in the old days, Dave said, the Spud had looked quite different. It was composed of two centers stuck together with milk chocolate, so as to resemble an actual potato, rather than half a potato. Old-timers still occasionally asked Dave when he was going to start making Spud bars the right way again.

  Gary walked to the end of the line and came back with a candy bar in a red, white, and blue wrapper. “Has he tried one of these yet?”

  “This is our Old Faithful,” Dave said.

  I’d done a good deal of fantasizing about what the Old Faithful might entail. The Spud, after all, was clearly shaped like a potato (or a half potato) and there was even some indication, based on the wrapper, that the coconut flakes on the outside were an attempt to simulate the eyes of a potato. So I had taken to envisioning the Old Faithful as a geyser of chocolate, exploding forth with wavelets of caramel and crisped rice. This was positively absurd, but it is how my mind operates.

  The Old Faithful was not a geyser. It was more like a small brick. I took a bite of the bar and inspected the cross section: a strip of marshmallow, topped by a thick band of milk chocolate, shot through with whole roasted peanuts. The arbitrary distribution of these peanuts gave the bar a lumpy, roguish look.

  “We’re working on a new mold for this one,” Dave said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking you might want to play off the geyser angle a little more, give the bar some upward motion. Like a geyser.”

  Gary had heard enough from me. He tipped his cap and turned to his next task, while Dave and I moved on to the wrapping section. The Foreigner tune that had been issuing from the radio in the enrobing area gave way to the tinkling treacle of the Alan Parsons Project.

  “Hey, take a look at this,” Dave said. He gestured to a fiftiesera box of Spuds whose fading legend read, A 60 CENT VALUE WITH 6 BARS! Dave flipped the box over. On the back was a set of international recipes: Idaho Spud Mousse in a Mold (France), Neapolitan Spud Cake (Italy), Chocolate Cream Spud Pie (Bavaria), and, of course, Idaho Spud Fondue (Switzerland).

  “That’s the one we like,” Dave said.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Oh yeah. It’s really easy. You just melt six Spuds in a fondue pot. We made it last week for a dinner party.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say. Dave hadn’t struck me as a fondue sort of guy. I saw him more in the bean dip milieu.

  We went upstairs to Dave’s unofficial office. It had a desk with a gallon bottle of vanilla on it, but no chair. In one corner of the room was a foot-thick steel door embossed with gold leaf. This was the old company safe, which was being used as a closet.

  Dave seemed totally at ease in his role as president, but he assured me it was not what he’d envisioned when he graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in accounting. Instead, he’d gone to work for EDS, Ross Perot’s old company. He found himself, at age 25, zooming up the corporate ladder. The problem was that he didn’t really want to be. So he quit. It was at this juncture that his father urged him (urged is probably too gentle a word) to return to Boise to run the company.

  “I showed up for my first day of work in a suit and the employees were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Dave said. “There was this one woman, Violet Brewer was her name. She’d worked for Idaho Candy for 82 years. She knew everything there was to know about the factory. Her friend told me she took one look at me and said, ‘Well, who’s going to fix the machines?’ ”

  Dave’s cell phone rang. It was Greg from upstairs. The mogul was broken again. He went upstairs to inspect the situation. When he came back down, an elderly blond woman in a garish blue windbreaker was waiting for him. Dave was wearing a hairnet and there were splotches of cornstarch all over his jeans. The woman looked at him nervously. “Are you really the owner?”

  “What was that about?” I asked, when she took her leave.

  “She wants to sell some of our old stuff on e-Bay,” Dave said, “the old wooden candy trays and stuff. I suppose we could describe them as collector’s items. They do have the residue of candy made a century ago.” He paused. “That’s what I like about this job—the breadth of it. I used to be an accountant, costing out billion-dollar contracts. Now I have to handle everything. Marketing, production, di
stribution, sales. I don’t have some big staff to test-market this or that. When I want to try something new, I go ask my friends what they think. It’s very seat-of-the-pants. I was drinking beer one night with a friend and we were like, ‘Hey, what can we do?’ We came up with chocolatecovered potato chips.” (I later bought a bag of these at this little Idaho tourist shop down the street. The combination of fried starch and chocolate was unstoppable, the snap of the chips pleasingly muted by the thin coat of chocolate.)

  Dave had left the coat-and-tie aspect of accounting behind, but he remained fascinated by the internal minutiae of his business. He showed me a pair of company audits from the twenties, handsome, leather-bound volumes, which he handled with elaborate care. The itemizations included a steel starch bucker ($1,100), a vacuum kettle ($1,500), and the very trays Dave was now considering selling on e-Bay (35 cents apiece). He gingerly unfolded an architectural drawing of the plant from 1925 and was about to compare this factory layout to his current setup, when he bolted upright. “Shoot,” he said. “I’m late for a parent/teacher conference.”

  AMERICAN LUNCH

  Before he dashed off, Dave recommended a few lunch options, including a place called the Beanery, and a Basque restaurant, whose menu included a great deal of lamb. It turned out that the Basque were some of the region’s earliest European settlers. They’d come in the 1890s to make their fortune as sheepherders. I know this because I stopped in at the chamber of commerce and read a bunch of pamphlets. I was also intrigued to learn a little more about Idaho’s leading exports. Potatoes get most of the play, but I am here to tell you that the state produces more than three-quarters of the nation’s trout, and 93 percent of its Austrian winter peas.

  It was a gorgeous late autumn day, around 60 degrees; I could see why the Basque had set down roots. Boise had a spiffy new downtown plaza, with sidewalks designed to look aged and a sleek convention center. I couldn’t help but notice that there was a steady stream of people passing into and out of this convention center, so I went over to investigate. The lobby was festooned with balloons. A cheerful young woman in a bright red polo shirt walked up to me. “Welcome to Food Expo 2002!” she said. “Who are you here representing?”