An ode, and also a scathing rebuke of, the flavored, sugary confections that infatuate the senses of our childhood….
by: David Margolin
Even the simplest candy dish or bowl, with a modest assortment of hard candies, conveys a message to visitors: “Welcome, we’re glad that you’re here; enjoy yourself.” My maternal grandparents and aunt lived in the flat above us. They had a small cut-glass candy bowl on the coffee table facing the plastic-covered couch. They weren’t big entertainers, but they kept the bowl well stocked with an assortment of candies.
I would never have thought of taking any candy from that bowl during a routine visit; that would have been cheating. I would only partake when I was there as a bonafide guest — a holiday dinner for example. On such occasions I would carefully lift the cover off the bowl and take my time examining the contents before choosing my favorite.
Some options were easy to exclude. I immediately eliminated taffy, caramel, and the like. Whatever enjoyment that variety of candy offered wasn’t worth the aftermath — having to extract the remnants deeply embedded in my molars and specifically the tricky space between my third molar and cheek. That oral-dead-zone, around the corner from my third molar, was beyond the point where my tongue was of any value. Finger extraction was an option, but messy and not socially acceptable.
I didn’t care for mints either. Mint in the garden has a lovely smell, but mints should be always kept separate from other types of candies. Their scent is so strong that they contaminate their neighbors when mixed in with non-mints. Mints should be content to stay in their own lane — on the hostess stand in restaurants near the business cards and toothpicks.
My favorite candy was wrapped to look like a strawberry. The cellophane wrapper was a cartoon of a strawberry — mostly red with little yellow dashes simulating the tiny “seeds” on the outside of the berry, and green on both ends, loosely representing a stem. The wrapper was so much fun that I overlooked the fact that the candy tasted nothing like a strawberry, or any other fruit. By far, the best method of enjoying the flavor of a fruit is the old fashioned way, to eat the real thing.
Fruit-filled hard candies came in other flavors, including orange, cherry, and pineapple. They also had gaily colored wrappers, but none of them had the verisimilitude of the strawberry candy.
Watermelon has generated a variety of hard candies colored to look like the real thing. The resemblance ranges from slap dash to frameable. Approximating the taste of the fruit is challenging since the main sensation of enjoying an actual watermelon is the profusion of available water, and the candy is, of course, waterless. The ones that I tried tasted like sugar mixed with air from the inside of an old bicycle tire.
I was also not a fan of fruit-slice candy. The prime examples were vaguely colored after a lemon, lime, orange, or watermelon slice. I view them as ancestors of the gummy candy species. As to that whole lineage, I say, “yuck.”
The truth is that I’ve never been a big fan of candy in general. I realized that I was an outlier on the candy craving scene when I was serving a two-week sentence at a YMCA camp in Wisconsin. I had been banished there by my parents who couldn’t face another sweltering Chicago summer cooped up with me and their other two kids.
Inmates, uhm, I mean, campers, could pick up candy vouchers at the camp office if their parents had put up the money. Most kids liked candy so much that the vouchers were like cigarettes in prison — worth their weight in gold. The vouchers were intended to last the full two weeks of camp, but some campers blasted through them in 24 hours. I think that I traded most of my candy vouchers for non-edible assets, including insect repellent and directions to the toilet.
My parents didn’t stock candy at home. We were an ice cream family and there was usually a pack of gum around. We were, however, allowed to purchase candy, and we would typically do so at the business we lovingly called “The Juice Store.” I don’t remember, and maybe never knew, the official name of that business. It was one of the many small businesses packed into a few blocks on Bryn Mawr Ave. on the far north side of Chicago. It was walking, or bike riding distance, from my house.
Under a liberal definition of the word, “The Juice Store” was a restaurant. It housed a soda fountain and counter, some booths, and glass display cases at the front of the store. The cases, tended by an enormous patient woman, showcased a dazzling variety of candy. The fun was in the looking and choosing, more than in the consuming. One of my two favorites were black licorice strips rolled up into a circle with a small piece of hard red candy in the center. The other was the small dots of hard candy stuck onto strips of opaque paper. Each dot had to be picked off the paper. I liked them because of the value (lots of dots for a few cents) and the variety of colors. The taste? Crunchy.
My purchases usually included novelty items that were too cute or too outrageous to pass up. Little wax replicas of soda bottles filled with faux-soda were in the too-cute category. There were a few of them in a miniature cardboard carton, patterned after the actual cartons with a handle for carrying soda or beer bottles. The liquid was colored in a bright pastel palette, and the flavor was watery sugar mixed with wax. After trying them a couple of times, I stopped drinking them, but I would buy them as a toy — to hold, carry and look at for a while before discarding them.
Lik-M-Aid was the prime example of the outrageous category. If you didn’t want to mess around with sucking or chewing a candy, Lik-M-Aid was for you. All you had to do was rip open the package and pour the colored sugar powder on your tongue. Oddly enough, this was socially acceptable and iit could be done in the full view of parents.
One reason candies are so popular is their social versatility. They are great for sharing in the full spectrum of formality, ranging from a cut glass candy bowl to hand-to-hand transfer. But they can also be enjoyed privately — secretly even We aren’t always in a sharing mood, or perhaps we’re down to our last piece of candy. No one else needs to know what delightful confection we have melting in our mouths at any given moment.
Another crucial candy element revolves around messaging. While the standard candy-dish message, “Welcome, we’re glad that you’re here. Enjoy yourself!,” is fine, for a more personal and direct approach to communication by candy there is nothing better than the Valentine’s Day hard candies. These pastel-colored heart-shaped missives carry their condensed message on their mini bodies like chest tattoos: “Luv You,” “Be Mine,” “Call Me.” We used to gift them to our favorite classmates in primary school along with tiny Valentine’s cards that fit tightly into their little clean white envelopes. I don’t think that the candies and cards spawned very many permanent romances, but the exchanges were certainly a fun diversion from the usual classroom fare. Even after returning to the history, arithmetic, or spelling lesson of the day, I could enjoy the powdery sweetness of the already-eaten heart-shaped candies lingering in my mouth, and savor the sweetness for hours from the residual supply resting on the top of my molars.
David Margolin enjoys writing comedy as in “Table Manners” (R U Joking?), nostalgia as in “Teabags” (Memoir Magazine), and grim fare as in “Brain Raid” and “Lost and Found — and Lost” (Freedom Fiction Journal). He lives in Portland Oregon with his invaluable editor, J.J. Margolin, and posts on https://davidmargolin.
