Since November 1st is the American kids’ version of the morning after the night before, it’s as good a day as any to take on the topic of candy.
Having spent yesterday at the home of my sister Trish, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts – a.k.a. Halloween central – where she has to plan for hundreds of trick or treaters, I had plenty of opportunity to graze on mini-bags of M&M’s and a Butterfingers. (Both go great with prosecco, by the way.)
Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays when I was a kid.
You got to be out withy our friends, roaming the streets with no adults (once you were five or six), dressed in scary costumes (one year I was a nun), and collecting candy (or the occasional popcorn ball or apple*) at every house within a half-mile radius of your own. What was not to like?
If you went to Catholic school, all the better, since November 1st is All Saints Day – a “holy day of obligation”. That obligation meant going to Mass in the morning, but once that was dispensed with, you had all day to hang out and pester your mother for some of the candy that you’d collected the evening before in your bulging pillow case swag-bag. (Sad to say, parochial school kids no longer get the day off – at least around here. What’s up with that? Don’t Catholics take their saints seriously any more? Last time I looked, they were still making them. By the way, there doesn’t appear to be any patron saint of candy. Cholera and chilblains, yes but, alas, candy or chocolate, no. St. Macarius – whoever he was – is the patron saint of candy makers, so I guess he’ll do. But maybe it could be St. Wolfgang of Regensberg, whose day we celebrate on October 31st.)
Halloween was an especially big deal in my family because we rarely had candy around the house. Candy was, apparently, the enemy of good teeth, and my mother wanted us to have strong German teeth, not soft Irish teeth. Other than what was in our Easter baskets, and the assortments that came with guests on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve - Whitman’s Sampler; Hebert Candy Mansion; Candy Cupboard: whatever was on sale at Sol’s Maincrest Pharmacy or Maloney Drugs; the two pound, double-decker assortments were, of course, the best – we never had candy around the house. (Cakes, cookies, pies, squares, puddings, ice cream…we didn’t lack for sweet stuff, and my mother baked a dessert, generally from scratch, almost every day. There was just a fatwa on candy. And soda, which we only had on Memorial Day, the 4th of July, and Labor Day. Our refresher summer drink was lemonade. While we never had soda – which was known as “tonic” at that time and place – my mother had no problem with considering Hawaiian Punch, as cloyingly sweet as any drink I can think of, short of swigging maple syrup, a breakfast juice. Go figure.)
Not that candy was forbidden outside the home. We were allowed to buy penny candy or a candy bar at Carrera’s Market. (I say “allowed”, but who knew whether my hyper-vigilant mother actually understood that a nickel from our allowance might actually be going to something other than mission money donations or savings so we could buy everyone in the family a 25 cent Christmas present from Woolworth’s.) At my grandmother’s house, there were always Brach toffees. God knows what she was doing with toffees, given her teeth situation. Nanny often had peanut brittle, as well. (Ditto the prior comment on the teeth situation.) And, for at least six months out of the year, she had a a candy dish holding leftover Christmas ribbon candy in her dining room. Talk about a tricky foodstuff: when it’s fresh, a misbitten shard can slice your lip off; when it’s old, it’s so sticky it adheres to your fingers like Gorilla Glue.
Long winded – hey, it’s my blog – way of bringing up an article that I saw in The NY Times last week about Samira Kawash.
Kawash is a former Rutgers professor (women and gender studies), who blogs about candy at Candy Professor.com. (It’s pretty interesting. If only I could think of a topic I was willing to mono-focus on….) She got into candy when:
Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans.
The mother froze. Her child had never tasted candy, she explained, but perhaps it would be all right just this once. Then the father weighed in from the other room, shouting that that they might as well give the child crack cocaine.
“It was clear to me that there was an irrational equation of candy and danger in that house,” Dr. Kawash said in a recent interview. “And that was irresistible to me.” (Source: NY Times article cited above.)
Just as candy is irresistible to me.
When I was 8, I somehow found myself with a quarter on my hands, and access to the nickel vending machine at the YWCA. I bought five chocolate bars and broke out in hives. (This was right about the same time that I sucked so hard on a soft, rubbery tumbler that I’d put over my mouth, that the vacuum I created broke all the blood vessels around my mouth and chin. What a little charmer I was!)
I don’t eat a ton of candy, but I usually have some decent dark chocolate around the house for when I get a craving. And we generally have some Good ‘n Plenty – my husband’s favorite - in a tin in the living room. He’s become an obsessive calorie counter, so he’ll take out 11 pieces or whatever it is that’s 50 calories worth, while I’ll just grab a handful. They’re pretty good, but anything chocolate will always remain my favorite.
I can’t say that I absolute adore all candy.
KitKat’s I could take or leave. (It’s really a cookies disguised as candy, anyway.) Sweet Tarts and Starbursts I can do without. Juicy Fruit and Bit o Honey, which I loved as a kid, I now consider just ghastly. Do they even make them anymore? And having sloughed off the back of one of my lower front teeth taking a bite out of Mary Jane last month, I’m definitely off anything taffy-ish for, say, the rest of my life. No more Squirrel Nuts. No more salt water taffy. That half piece of Mary Jane – I was sharing it with my sister Trish – cost me $250 bucks…
But the only truly terrible “candy” I ever had was a horehound drop, which I believe was purchased on a family outing to Sturbridge Village. Bad enough you had to sleep on a corn-cob stuffed bed, crap in an out house, and get sewed into your long underwear every year for the duration of winter, a horehound drop was considered the big treat? It looked, innocently enough, rather like a rootbeer barrel. But no….Instead, it was blecchhhhhh. I spit mine out.
If I had to pick a favorite candy – other than saying that, generically, I really like dark chocolate – I guess it would have to be M&M’s, which is the candy (plain or peanut) I’m most likely to buy if I have a candy jones.
Ah, candy!
“At least candy is honest about what it is,” [Kawash] said. “It has always been a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit.”
The food equivalent of indulging in an occasional People Magazine or episode of Jersey Shore. Fine in moderation.
That’s just dandy with me.
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