Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  “This is where we actually cook our Big Hunk,” Karl said.

  “Smells like marshmallow,” I said.

  “No,” she said brusquely. “The Big Hunk has nothing to do with marshmallow.” The very notion seemed to cause her physical discomfort. “It’s a vanilla nougat with—”

  “I thought it was taffy,” I said.

  “Nougat,” Karl said. “A vanilla nougat with peanuts.”

  “Isn’t nougat supposed to be sort of fluffy?” I said.

  Karl stared at me. “Well, alright, I guess it’s a chewy nougat.” She pointed to a huge kettle, which was being hoisted pretty much over my head and toward an even huger steel hopper. A worker in a brown apron stood on a raised platform. A sort of ballet ensued, in which the worker grabbed the kettle and angled its contents—a sticky white syrup now pebbled with peanuts—into the hopper. The liquid nougat then squirted through a spigot at the bottom of the hopper into a six-footlong bread pan.

  “What we do,” Karl said, hurrying past the platform, “is we put the pans into these ovens here and cook the nougat. Then, once they’ve gotten to the right consistency, we take out the pans and what we’ve got is a loaf. The nougat is pretty hard to get out, so these guys have to slam the pans. You can hear it all over the building.”

  The loaves were then fed, two at a time, into a truly fearsome cutting machine called a Phizer, which sliced each loaf into slender bars. This process accounted for the unique look of the Big Hunk, which featured a cross section of browned peanuts floating in the white nougat. Karl picked up one of the bars from the assembly line. It drooped onto her fist. “The Big Hunk is the best when it’s warm and soft like this,” she said. “What we recommend is for people to pop them into the microwave for a few seconds. It’s right on the back of the package.”

  REMEMBER THIS NAME: BANANA-ZABA

  To see how the U-no bars were made, we took a trip to a place called the chocolate platform, a small, raised area that (as one might expect) was liberally decorated with chocolate. Indeed, it looked liked the scene of a particularly grisly chocolate homicide. The stuff was everywhere: dripping from the pipes, spattered on buckets and boxes, congealed into dark reddish pools on the floor. “Oh, this is terrible!” Karl said. “What a mess. This is the reason we don’t usually show this area to anybody. You should know we’re getting new machinery.”

  The filling for the U-no bars was basically milk chocolate whipped full of air and finely ground almonds. Karl showed me the machine that did this whipping; it was equipped with 20 blades, none of which I could actually see because they were moving way too fast. The resulting substance, which I am reluctant to categorize as either liquid or solid, was then piped downstairs to a machine called an extruder. I had heard a fair amount about the extruder in my candy travels and had envisioned something like a giant pastry funnel squeezed by means of a hydraulic pump or, perhaps, costumed dwarfs. The Annabelle extruder was a bit of a letdown, in that:

  1. It was a large metal box; and

  2. The exact mechanism of extrusion was concealed within this large metal box.

  All I could see (and this only by squatting down and craning my neck) was the pale brown filling emerging from somewhere in the form of slender bars. Despite the pleasant aroma, the visual image was somewhat disconcerting, and I did not linger.

  The bars were cooled, enrobed in a darker chocolate, then cooled again. I spent a minute or so hinting to Karl that I really wanted to try a U-no bar fresh off the line. She assured me that she would grab me some samples later. “They’re really good frozen,” she said. “They taste like mousse.” But I was intrigued by the prospect of the ground almonds and intoxicated by the smell of the enrober and so I waited until Karl had turned to speak to her factory manager, Carlos, then grabbed a U-no bar that was lying on a rejects cart. I had about 30 seconds to eat the bar and did so, in three bites. (As a result of this decision I spent the rest of the day revisiting the U-no bar, in the form of flavored burps, a not-altogether-unpleasant arrangement.)

  My feelings about the U-no were conflicted. On the one hand, I could see what Karl was talking about with her mousse comment. The bar did have pillowy texture. The ground almonds, while not really detectable on the tongue, lent the chocolate a rich, nutty undertone. The problem resided with what I’ll call the fat quotient. Mousse, after all, tastes good because it’s full of cocoa butter, and the mouth recognizes this at once. The U-no, by contrast, contained a good deal of air, and the result was an ineradicable sense of partial vacancy, of subterfuge—like eating a rice cake. I did not mention this to Karl, of course. I merely gulped down the bar and hoped that the line workers who had witnessed my act of thievery wouldn’t rat me out.

  I was most interested in seeing the Abba-Zaba being made. For those who have never had the good fortune of tasting an Abba-Zaba, it is easily distinguished as the only candy bar (that I know of) which contains peanut butter inside taffy. Indeed, the great joy of eating an Abba-Zaba resides in the peculiar oral aspects of combining these two candy genres, generally thought to be disparate. The American palette is accustomed, by this time, to chocolate and peanut butter. We think nothing of the combination, in part because both substances melt at about the same temperature. That is, they make the fateful transformation from solid to liquid contemporaneously. Not so with the Abba-Zaba. Taffy may soften, after all, but it remains resilient, essentially solid, in the gnashed heat of the mouth. The peanut butter, by contrast, yields almost immediately and begins a delicious process of seepage, so that you are left, in effect, with an organically rendered peanut butter taffy. (The same process abides with the Charleston Chew: the warmth of the tongue, along with the motion of the teeth, softens the taffy and infuses it with the melted chocolate coating.)

  The Abba-Zaba was not in production, but Karl agreed to walk me through the process. She began by leading me into the “heat room,” a darkened sarcophagus where they stored the taffy and peanut butter in white plastic bins. You could only see the dim outlines of these bins, and their contents gave off a ghostly shimmer, like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Abba-Zaba production line itself was humble. “Here’s how it works,” Karl said. “We cook up a huge batch of taffy, which looks sort of funny when it first comes out of the kettle, like Elmer’s glue or something. So then we pull it on this mechanical horse and it gets less sticky and turns opaque. Then feed it into this batch roller, which flattens it out into a thin sheet. Then—”

  Karl paused. She bent over to inspect the batch roller. Her brow furrowed. She had noticed a series of names soldered onto one of the rollers.

  “Sammy,” she called out. “Sammy!”

  Sammy was one of the company mechanics, a thin man in a blue cotton jumpsuit who was down at the other end of the line. He came loping over.

  “Look at this,” Karl said. She gestured at the names. “Did you guys do this?”

  Sammy looked at the names (sammy among them) and grinned bashfully.

  I was worried that something terrible was going to happen now, that Karl was going to fire Sammy on the spot, all because she’d spotted this industrial graffiti, all because I’d come to visit the plant and asked to see the Abba-Zaba line.

  But Karl surprised me. She burst out laughing. “Isn’t that funny?” she said. “You guys are so crazy.”

  It struck me that Karl, despite her somewhat type A ferocity, was really a pretty nice woman, and I was relieved to find that she ran a factory where little individualistic flourishes like soldering your name onto a batch roller were to be laughed at, as opposed to what would happen to you at Mars headquarters, for instance, which is that you would be escorted from the plant and shot.

  “Alright,” Karl said. “So we’ve got a sheet of taffy coming down the line. This is where the peanut butter comes in.” She gestured to the large warming tank beside the batch roller. “The peanut butter gets pumped over from this thing, which is a sort of peanut butter Jacuzzi, and squirted onto the center
of the taffy. That part’s the most fun to watch. Then the taffy gets folded over, so it’s one continuous strip, and it gets fed through the cutter, which forms the seal on both ends.”

  We headed back to Karl’s office, where some time was given over to the standard lamentations of small independent candy companies. Karl was particularly disgusted by the recent adoption of the phrase real estate to designate rack space. Because the Big Three had purchased virtually all the retail real estate, Annabelle was often forced to place the Big Hunk in a position where you couldn’t even read the name of the bar.

  Karl had an aggressive sales staff, and she gave them a good deal of latitude. But there wasn’t a lot she could do when it came to the crucial variable, which was price. She feared that Annabelle would be one of the first casualties, should the Big Three begin a price war.

  “The big demand from the sales network is always to come out with something new,” Karl added. “But that’s hard for a company like ours, because we can’t really afford to buy a bunch of new machinery. So we do brand extensions. My brother and I did the dark chocolate Rocky Road. And some years ago, we did a Choco-Zaba—”

  “I remember those!” I said. “I loved those!”

  I was one of the few, Karl noted dryly.

  Still, she was always on the lookout for new products. Her most recent brainstorm was an Abba-Zaba with raspberry in the middle. Karl knew that fruit flavors had become really popular and that raspberry topped the list. She settled on the name Raza-Zaba and even began cranking out prototypes. The problem was that, after a few days, the raspberry would start bubbling through the taffy. So her new idea was to combine a green apple taffy with the peanut butter filling.

  I had, in fact, never heard of people eating green apples and peanut butter. I asked her whether banana and peanut butter might be a more familiar combination? (My brother Dave had basically survived adolescence on bananas and peanut butter.)

  “Bananas?” Karl said, experimentally.

  “You could call it Banana-Zaba,” I suggested.

  “Banana-Zaba. Hmmmph.”

  I wasn’t sure what this meant, this hmmmph. Did it mean: Yes, by gum, that might just work! Or did it mean: Who are you again and why did I agree to talk to you? This was never made clear to me, because Karl clapped her hands and went to fetch me some samples and then, politely, sent me on my merry way.

  12

  A SECOND DEPRESSING BUT NECESSARY DIGRESSION

  It was now Thursday, just before noon, and I had covered 4,000 miles in the past four days and seen the inner workings of four different candy factories and survived on a diet that would have made the International House of Pancakes seem like a health food concern. In the course of this journey, I had diagnosed myself with cancer and spent my idle moments in a froth of anxiety. The Republican Party had taken over Congress, so that coddling the rich was the new national pastime, along with watching wars on TV. I had not slept particularly well and, in a few hours, I would have to drive (without a license, ergo, illegally) to San Francisco International Airport to board a red-eye flight back to Boston, then take a taxi to my house, then drive out to Boston College, where a group of students would be waiting for me with their eyes full of cigarette lust and their hearts shut tight as antique lockets, and it would be my job, presumably, to do something about this.

  I drifted over the Dumbarton Bridge in a haze of self-pity, gazing at the puny chemical tides rolling in and the tan hills of the East Bay, pleading for rain. Dead ahead was the megapolized mess of 101 and the sad old truth that home is never quite what you left. The trees and streets are all too small and your tired old parents are some newer, haunted incarnation, and you are no longer the child who stared at them in hope of rescue, but an adult responsible for your own sorrow. Just to make sure there was no confusion on this point, my folks had moved across town, to some big new imposter home. The Old Barrel was gone, too. They’d turned it into an old-age home.

  It was Freud’s belief that people return, inexorably, to the trauma of their childhoods. And he was right. I had spent most of my adult life doing just that, making my best friends into cruel brothers, my bosses into negligent fathers, my sweet, clutching lovers into insufficient mothers. And thereby, fading into my late thirties, I still lived in a condition of aggrieved solitude, as I had so many years ago. I couldn’t escape.

  I had always imagined that some splendid woman would come along and cure me. Or that my work as a writer, my passionate, empathic accomplishments, would overwrite the bad files of my childhood. And what I realized, as I drove through that light California rain, was that the burden of these great hopes was often too much for me to bear. I feared I would die before I got better. In certain ways, I wanted to die. And, in certain ways, I felt dead already.

  I had decided to write about candy because I assumed it would be fun and frivolous and distracting. It would allow me to reconnect to the single, untarnished pleasure of my childhood. But, of course, there are no untarnished pleasures. That is only something the admen of our time would like us to believe. Most of our escape routes are also powerful reminders; and whatever our conscious motives might be, in our secret hearts we wish to be led back into our grief.

  There sat the bag of goodies from Annabelle on the seat beside me. I reached in and grabbed myself a Big Hunk so that, even as these dark musings tossed me about, even as I gave myself over to tears, I was also tasting, for the first time in many years, the sweet, cake-batter nougat of that bar and the soft roasted peanuts exploding with flavor on my tongue; chewing and chewing until my jaw ached with the effort.

  A LITTLE HIDDEN BOMB IN MY IDAHO SPUD

  I don’t expect that it will come as any great surprise that the drizzle of that afternoon thickened into a torrential downpour. Nor that winds, sweeping down from the north, created the fiercest storm the Bay Area had seen in several years. Nor that this storm was serious enough to shut down the airport. I did not discover this last fact, however, until I had arrived at my gate.

  This left me and 120 other fellow budget travelers playing a restless, grumpy waiting game, the central components of which were whining into cell phones and directing dirty looks at the poor schlubs working the ticket counter. In the course of commiserating with a few fellow passengers, I revealed the purpose of my trip, and before long we were munching our way through the last of the peanut clusters and chocolatecovered pretzels Marty Palmer had given me. A brief jolt of good humor ensued, followed by a plunge into hypoglycemic grumpiness. My connecting flight was at 7 A.M., out of Chicago. I had a 90-minute cushion, but the delay dragged on and on, one hour, two hours. Would they hold the plane in Chicago? Nobody could say. We were supposed to be in the air by 11 P.M., but it was 1:27 A.M. before they began the boarding call.

  And here is where the trouble truly began.

  I want to make clear that I had grown accustomed, by this time, to the notion that my bags were going to be inspected by airport security. They had been inspected in Boston and Milwaukee and Kansas City and Denver and in Boise, twice. The reasons for this were quite clear. First, all my flights were oneway. Second, having lost my driver’s license, I was using an ancient passport, which featured a rather unfortunate photo taken in 1993. In this photo, my face was cloaked in eleven o’clock shadow and my hair was styled in a manner I can only describe as Upscale Taliban.

  There was a somewhat comical aspect to these inspections, as my carryon filled with more and more obscure candy bars. The woman in Boise had gone so far as to take these bars out of my suitcase and line them up, one by one, on her inspection table.

  “What are these?” she asked me.

  “Candy bars,” I said.

  “Twin Binge,” she said. “I’ve never heard of a Twin Binge.”

  “Bing,” I said. “It’s from Iowa.”

  “What’s an Old Faithful?”

  “Those are made here in Boise.”

  She made a noise with her tongue, a soft click intended to express friendly sk
epticism. And this was just fine. This was Boise, after all. The flight was only half full. There was plenty of time for such shenanigans.

  But here in San Francisco, with a long line of passengers blundering down the jet way, and more behind, and the hopes of my connecting flight fading with each passing minute, I was in a less-forgiving mood. The gentleman assigned to inspect my bags was likewise afflicted. He was a short, stout Asian and he opened my suitcase and immediately began raking his fingers through my belongings. I’d brought only a few clothes, and I was wearing most of them, in anticipation of Boston’s winter weather. What he was really doing was mauling my sad, strange collection of candy bars.

  I wasn’t questioning his right to inspect my bag. This was how Americans had chosen to react to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Rather than asking ourselves why a bunch of pious lunatics hated us so much, we hired security guards to sift through our bags. These minor mortifications made us feel safe, and seemed a fair penance for not having been blown up, and for living in such unconscionable comfort.

  The other passengers, passing by, looked upon this spectacle with weary curiosity, while I stood on the carpet in my socks. What, I wondered, did he expect to find? Anthrax spores in my Valomilk? A little hidden bomb in my Idaho Spud? Surely, if I’d packed my suitcase with Snickers bars and Hershey’s Kisses, there would have been no such mucking about. I felt like saying to this fellow, Look here: these candy bars you’re tossing around, they are a link to our glorious past, to the underdog entrepreneurial spirit that is the finest manifestation of capitalism. It is the bullying voraciousness of the big companies, the need for total worldwide brand domination, that has made America a symbol of greed and an object of derision. This was probably nonsense, but it felt true at the moment, and it was something to occupy my mind while the rest of the plane filled up with tired travelers.

  I managed to catch my connection in Chicago. They held the plane and I scampered through Midway airport and felt an odd sense of good fortune, gratitude even, at the obscene miracles of modern travel.