Books, pt. 3: Candyfreak

Rich recommended I read Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, which I think he got from Froyo, so when I saw it for $6 in Boston, but a few T stops from Boston College, where the author, Steve Almond, beats grammar into freshmen, I snapped it up, even though it was hardback and I prefer paperbacks. It turned out to be a very entertaining, breezy account of every aspect of Almond’s obsession with candy. From the prologue, “Some things you should know about the author”:

3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating for effect.
I am not exaggerating for effect.
Here is a catalog of all the candy in my apartment as of right now, 3:21 p.m., July 6, 2003:

• 2 pounds minature Clark Bars
• 1.5 pounds dark chocolate-covered mint patties
• 24 bite-size peanut butter cups
• 1 pound Tootsie Roll Midgets
• 4 ounces of Altoids-like cinnamon disks
• 6 ounces cherry-flavored jellies (think budget Jujyfruits)
• A single gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with mysterious butter truffle-type filling
• 2 squares of Valrona [sic] semisweet chocolate (on my bedside table)
• 3 pieces Fleer bubblegum

I am not counting the fourteen boxes of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark, which I have stored in an undisclosed warehouse location, nor whatever candy I might have stashed, squirrel-like, in obscure drawers.

So you can tell that he’s serious about candy. He mostly talks about all the candies he’s ever eaten, the ones he’s heard about but hasn’t eaten, the ones he used to eat that don’t exist anymore, etc. The meat (or nutmeat) of the book is where he goes on a cross-country frenzy of visiting the small regional family candy companies that still make Twin Bings and Idaho Spuds and Abba-Zabas and Five Star Bars, which he claims, convincingly, are the single greatest candy bar in existence:

There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate. You almost never see milk and dark chocolate commingled, but the effect in this bar was striking: The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the butter dissolution of caramel. What I mean here: there was a temporal aspect to the bar, a sense of evanescence and persistence.

There’s also a lot of interesting history and background and whatnot, plus some sort of distressing introspection about why he likes candy so much: basically, because his family didn’t love him.