Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  The aroma of coconut was overpowering. It was like I’d stuck my head inside a giant Thai food sauna.

  “You know we’d like to have a fifth Five Star Bar,” he said.

  “So I’ve been playing around with the idea of a Coconut Bar.”

  I told Dave, as politely as I could, that I thought this was a very bad idea, not least of all because of the creepy dead-skin texture of shredded coconut.

  He nodded. “Try a little bit of this.”

  To my shock, the substance had all the tropical wallop of coconut but a mouthfeel that was smooth and buttery.

  Dave had found a company to manufacture this ingredient for him, all natural and kosher for Passover. He was well into considering the elements that might make up the rest of the bar: chocolate chips, dried fruit, possibly the cherries he’d been working with, and a dark chocolate, to balance the sweetness of the coconut. He was not about to introduce a fifth Five Star Bar unless it stood up to the other four. He was adamant about this point and I did not, for a moment, doubt him.

  We headed back to the quiet of the lab. Dave plainly felt most comfortable here, amid his various ingredients, where he was free to improvise, to mix and melt and create. He had me sample some of his recent creations, including a dark chocolate–covered almond which tasted (curiously enough) a lot like the chocolatecovered graham crackers I had worshipped as a kid.

  I confessed that I’d sort of hoped the fifth Five Star Bar would showcase coffee. Dave told me that he’d been working on a bar infused with coffee. He’d already tried sixteen or seventeen different extracts, none of which passed muster. Not long ago, Lampman had come to him with what he described as the perfect coffee flavor. He and Dave then set about trying to figure out how this extract had been made. Lampman felt certain that cocoa butter was somehow involved. “So what we did,” Dave said, “was we got some good French roast and brewed it in cocoa butter and let it steep and strained it out and there it was. The exact same product. A lot of my knowledge has come that way: eating something and then trying to figure out what it is I’m eating.”

  “Do you ever get sick of chocolate?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Dave said. “Sometimes after I leave here I’ve got to go eat a head of cauliflower. Then again, I get to eat some of the best chocolate in the world. And I’m a chocolate snob, personally. I can’t even eat a Hershey’s bar. It’s got maybe 22 percent chocolate liqueur, and that sour milk flavor. I mean, it’s like baby vomit to me.” It turned out that Dave had been born in England. His parents had immigrated to America, but much of his family had stayed in England, and he’d grown up eating European chocolate.

  I had now taken two hours of Dave’s time, and it was clear he had work to do. The idea of leaving his lab, however, made me a little panicky. I wanted to stay. I wanted, in some sense, never to leave. It occurred to me that Dave might need an apprentice. He indicated that he was not really in the market for an apprentice. He did promise to put in a good word for me when it came time to select a new member for the tasting panel.

  This was certainly a kind gesture. But what I really wanted was this: for Lake Champlain—with its exquisite attention to intricacies of flavor and texture—to open a can of whoopass on the mainstream candy market. I asked Dave, as a kind of desperate parting shot, if this could ever happen. He shook his head. The company was toying with the idea of introducing a product in the impulse buy market, like the Ferrero Rocher, a German gourmet candy that had managed to fight its way onto the grocery racks. But that was as far as they could go.

  So I headed out of the lab feeling a bit deflated. Most Americans, I knew, would never taste the glories of the Five Star Bar. They would continue to chomp through their PayDays and Fast Breaks, unaware of these deeper pleasures. A second tour group of seniors, this one from Maine, was milling about the retail store at the front of the factory, fretting over prices. This was certainly a bummer. But then, before I could launch into one of my self-thwarting diatribes, Chris the PR guy appeared and handed me a large bag of seconds—which included a raft of mango creams—and I felt much better.

  FREAK FETISH

  My spirits remained high, even after I’d plowed through the freebies. Dave Bolton had invigorated me, precisely because he was willing to talk about the experience of the world in his mouth, and with great precision. In the weeks following my visit, I found myself asking (alright, grilling) my friends more explicitly about their various freak fetishes.

  Carmen told me she was fond of placing her favorite candy bar, Snickers, under her thigh, so as to warm the bar to a state where it was just on the verge of melting. My own Snickers methodology, by contrast, was to freeze the bar and cut it into thin sections. I did so not just because I’m a cheapskate (though I certainly am a cheapskate) but because I enjoyed seeing a cross section of each bite, and because I like caramel best when it’s chilled to a taffyish consistency.

  Evan revealed, with little prompting, his childhood method for eating Whoppers, which was to bore a tiny hole in the chocolate coating, then to use his saliva to dissolve the malted milk interior, leaving a perfectly intact milk chocolate ball. He would then place the Whopper back in the family candy bowl, and watch, with the unbridled sadistic pleasure of a nine year old, as some unlucky adult chomped down on the hollowedout ball. “Or you can also just eat them yourself,” he told me. “They taste especially good if you enjoy the taste of chocolate and your own spit.”

  At the risk of further offending the squeamish, I must report that an old college pal told me, in a moment of tipsy overconfession, that he had recently used a Butterfinger to liven up the proceedings with his girlfriend. (This did not disgust me in the least, as my idea of high-concept pornography often involves naked women and candy bars.) Several friends described an allegiance to Wint-O-Green LifeSavers, based on the fact that they spark when bitten in the dark. Another told me she buys the York Peppermint Pattie mostly because the bar produces an audible sigh when broken in half.

  In other words, people don’t just have favorite candy bars, but particular oral strategies for eating them. M&M’s are the best example; they represent a kind of confectionery Rorschach. Putting aside the basic question of peanut versus plain, you might consider this: Do you eat single or multiple? Do you bite or suck? If you suck, do you store the M&M’s on your tongue, or between cheek and gum? Do you allow the outer shell to melt completely, or do you smoosh the piece once the candy coating has become delicate enough? I myself enjoy balancing each piece between my front teeth and biting down on the circumference, thus popping off one half of the candy shell. I then work off the second half with my tongue, leaving (if all goes well) a pod of pure chocolate, which I soften on the roof of my mouth.

  What does this say about me, this bite-and-suck approach? Should it be an issue in my therapy? And does it matter that I still smell my food before I put it in my mouth? Or that I have been known to take a bite of a cookie at my weekly poker game and, if the flavor or texture fails to please, place the rest of it back on the plate? What to make of the fact that I still bite Clark Bars lengthwise, as Manny De Costa taught me? Or that, at the urging of my brother Dave, I ate several M&M’s out of the gutter at age four?

  This will not be on the final.

  6

  THE OFFICIAL DARK HORSE FREAK OF PHILADELPHIA

  I was bombing down State Road in north Philly with my pal Jena, pretty much totally lost, when my cell phone rang. It was Carl Goldenberg, the president of Goldenberg Candy.

  “Where are you?” he said. “Have you passed the prison yet?”

  “The prison?” I said.

  “We’re across the street from the prison,” Carl said. “The prison is pink.”

  I turned to Jena, who was driving. “Have we passed a pink prison?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  I told Carl I thought we were close by, as I wanted him to believe in my essential competence, which was questionable at best, and perhaps less than questionable
in matters of navigation.

  “Maybe we should turn around,” Jena said.

  We turned around.

  State Road was not the most attractive part of Philly. It seemed to consist of two basic business elements: warehouses and shops offering various auto repair options. After a few blocks, Jena pointed out her window. “Isn’t that accordion wire?” she said. Why, yes it was. And weren’t those guard towers? And there in the distance, that vast, bunkerlike, pink building … “How did we miss that?” Jena said.

  We pulled into the parking lot across the street from the prison, still not quite sure if we were in the right place. Then Jena opened her door and the aroma of roasted peanuts hit us like a full-force gale and we were lifted up again, by roasted peanuts.

  “This must be the place,” she said.

  I’d called the Goldenbergs a few weeks earlier, on the advice of a candy distributor in Cambridge. The Goldenbergs were one of the few true family operations left in the candy world, producers of a bar called Peanut Chews. I had never heard of it before, which Jena had some trouble believing.

  “Peanut Chews,” she said. “Come on. Peanut Chews.”

  My friend Laura in Baltimore adopted the same incredulous tone. “You know, Peanut Chews.”

  Well, I didn’t know Peanut Chews. I’d never lived in Philly or Baltimore, the apparent Heartland of Peanut Chews.

  “You found us,” Carl said, ushering us into his office. “Good, good. Excuse the boxes.”

  I assumed, based on the boxes, that the Goldenbergs had just moved. Actually, Carl said, the move took place five years ago. It was taking him some time to settle in. He was delighted with the new factory, though. At the old plant, the female workers were often frightened when they had to walk to their cars at night. In this new location, the criminal element was, conveniently, locked up across the street. Carl smiled at Jena. He was an elegant, elderly gentleman, a bit of a flirt, with soft blue eyes and an avuncular manner. He led us out of his office and down a corridor that led to a white door.

  “We have two different coatings and lots of different wrappers, but we only make one thing, really, and it all begins with the roasting of peanuts.” With a flourish, he flung the door open.

  I had not thought it possible that the scent of roasting peanuts could be any more intense than what we experienced in the parking lot. And I was wrong. The parking lot, after all, was an open-air venue, whereas the roasting room was an enclosed space. The dominant feature, not surprisingly, was the roaster itself, the main body of which looked like an overweight torpedo. One hundred and ten–pound sacks of peanuts, redskins trucked up from Georgia, were fed into this beast and spun around and around and blasted with fire.

  A number of other things were done to these peanuts before they appeared again to the naked eye. They were sucked up into an air conveyor, a process that helped cool them. They were relieved of their husks, which were blown down a quartet of long, square shafts running from the ceiling to just above the floor. (Each shaft emitted a lovely red mist of desiccated skins.) They were run through a metal detector and a split-nut blancher, which divided them in half. Finally, the nuts came pouring down a chute and onto a conveyor belt, where two workers in blue smocks plucked out any burned or disfigured specimens. These were some very busy peanuts.

  “My father designed this whole system,” Carl shouted, over the roar of the roaster. “He was a mechanical genius.”

  We spent a few minutes gazing at the huge, heated tanks used to store molasses and corn syrup, the two main liquid ingredients used in Peanut Chews. Carl showed us the room where the company stored its chocolate coating, in a chemical tank purchased from Eastman Kodak—presumably after a thorough cleaning—and outfitted with a steam jacket. Carl was careful to emphasize the word coating because Goldenberg uses what’s known in the industry as compound—cocoa mass with soy lecithin providing the fat content instead of cocoa butter. They made the switch in the fifties, when both peanut and chocolate prices were skyrocketing. “The chocolate we were buying was awful anyway,” he said. “We found the compound actually tasted a lot better with our center, which is crunchy and not as sweet.”

  A few yards from the peanut roaster, a fellow in chef’s whites was pouring a white, gelatinous substance into a stainless steel kettle. “This is how our filling gets made,” Carl said. He was reluctant to disclose the exact recipe, which had been handed down from his grandfather, other than to note that it included five different types of sugar, three of them liquid. He seemed more comfortable discussing what the filling wasn’t: It had no milk and therefore wasn’t a caramel. It wasn’t a syrup. It wasn’t a brittle. So what was it?

  From what Jena and I could see, it was goop. (Yes, another technical term.) We watched as this golden-brown goop was piped from the kettle into another oddly torpedo-shaped tank, where the roasted peanuts were added. The blend, now lumpy with nuts, tumbled down a long chute, onto a wide white conveyor belt, where it was flattened by rollers into a slab about two feet across.

  “In the old days, we used to have to pour each batch onto a marble slab and flatten it with paddles,” Carl explained. “When it was cool enough, we cut it into large loaves and ran those through sizers, which crushed most of the peanuts. The system you’re watching is called ConSlab, short for continuous slab, which means no one touches the candy until the consumer opens the wrapper. We were the first ones in the country to use ConSlab. The second one went to Charleston Chew.”

  The slab disappeared into a long cooling tunnel and emerged a hundred feet later. It was a gorgeous sight, this tongue of glistening golden goop with peanuts suspended inside. Regrettably, the knives came next. They cut the slab into two dozen half-inch strips, which were then gently pried apart.

  I mentioned to Carl that the strips looked sort of like dreadlocks.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Next,” he said, “each of these strands gets cut into minis. There’s a camera that measures to make sure we get the precise length. There’s just one size. We package them differently. But the basic piece is what you’re looking at.” (Originally, Peanut Chews were made in full-size bars, but the company switched to bite-size pieces in the 1930s, at the request of movie house operators.) Carl gazed down with naked affection at the minis, chugging along in their uniform rows. He picked a bit of scrap off the side of the ConSlab. “Try this.”

  To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. What had I seen, after all? Peanuts. Goop. But the piece was absolutely exquisite, like a rich taffy, with a hint of molasses for body, and the peanuts provided a pleasing textural snap and a rush of smoked flavor.

  Carl nodded. “Wonderful, isn’t it? We’d love to be able sell it this way, straight off the line. We can’t do that, obviously. But we do produce them to order, which means we ship them straight onto the shelves. They don’t sit around in a warehouse.”

  With a sudden, courtly bow and hand wave, he presented a piece to Jena.

  “It’s so peanutty,” Jena said.

  “I never get sick of the taste,” Carl said. “To me, nothing compares to a Peanut Chew. Snickers are terrible.” His voice, in this cadenced tenor of disgust, called to mind Jackie Mason. “Compared to this—what? They drop a few peanuts in it and tell you there’s peanuts. This is all peanuts. The filling is just there to keep the peanuts together.”

  Jena had never seen an enrober, so we stood there and listened to her make all the appropriate noises as the sheet of dark chocolate compound washed down onto the army of identical minis. When the time came, I laid a hand on her shoulder and coaxed her from her inaugural freaktrance and we moved on to the next cooling tunnel.

  The finished pieces, now coated and gleaming, were put through a series of industrial calisthenics as they moved from rows of two dozen across to single file. This seems easy enough, but you tend not to realize how complicated a process becomes when it’s mechanized. The minis were forced to make a little steeplechase leap onto a vibrating table and then hustle
d around a little circular track and sent whizzing toward the scary-looking wrapping machines, which were the source of considerable fascination to Carl, who spent many minutes detailing their function while I snuck Peanut Chew after Peanut Chew from the scrap table into my craw.

  WEE WILLIE AND THE POP-A-LICKS RAGE

  Carl led us back to his office. Jena asked him about how he stayed so thin working in a candy factory and Carl, now thoroughly smitten, noted that he’d just lost 20 pounds. The two of them discussed dieting for a while. Then they talked about downtown Philadelphia. Was a job offer in the offing? It was too early to tell.

  Finally, I managed to get Carl to detail the history of the business. His grandfather, David Goldenberg, had come to Philadelphia from Romania in 1880. He was eighteen years old, the youngest of seven children. That was all Carl really knew about his origins because David, like most immigrants, had no interest in his own past. He found work at carnivals, selling cotton candy and caramel apples, eventually opening a retail store on Kensington Avenue. The entire family, his wife and seven children, lived over the store, where they all worked. They made cakes and ice creams, as well as sweets. The Goldenberg scion was, by all reports, a small man, but his appetite was legendary. He used to head down into the basement, where they did the baking, grab a fresh pie, plop a pint of ice cream on top, and eat the whole thing. This struck me as a totally excellent thing to do. It reminded me of my own favorite dessert growing up, aside from candy, which was a kind of goulash I prepared by crushing half a dozen Oreos into a bowl of Breyers mint chip ice cream, then placing my desk lamp directly over the bowl. (This was in the days before microwaves; I had to improvise.)

  David eventually expanded his business to a double storefront and began selling candies to other businesses. World War I turned out to be his big break. The army needed ration bars. He took what had been a walnut loaf and used peanuts instead, because they were cheaper. When the war ended, the soldiers had a taste for the bars. Eventually the company began to ship Peanut Chews down the Delaware River to Baltimore. From there, wagon jobbers would distribute them as far as York.