Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond Read Free Book Online

amassed, not entirely on purpose, was a retro candy empire.
    Marshall looked up from his desk. He was done with his lecture. Martha Stewart was, presumably, waiting in the wings. ( FAX ME !) The moment of truth had now arrived.
    “I’d like to tour the factory,” I said.
    Marshall sighed. “Fine. We can have Manny show you around.”
    I MANNY
    Manny De Costa, the facilities manager at Necco, met me the next day at company headquarters on Mass Ave. He looked like a slightly puffed version of Norman Schwarzkopf: stern, firm-chinned, capable of inflicting significant damage with his bare hands, though he turned out to be the nicest man imaginable and no danger to anyone at all, unless you happened to be coated in chocolate.
    The retro theme of Necco extended to the decor, which could have been generously described as Late Eisenhower. The elevator had a gold-plated dial above it, with an arrow to indicate the floor. The filing cabinets were wooden. On the wall was a poster, illustrated in the manner of a Watchtower magazine, which read NECCO: THE MODERN CANDIES WITH A TRADITION OF QUALITY . The only indication that the Korean War had, in fact, ended was the ’N Sync poster in the receptionist’s cage.
    “This building’s been here since 1927, so a lot of this stuff is from quite a while ago,” Manny explained. “We don’t really throw anything out.” Manny himself had come to Necco as a shipping clerk 35 years ago. (His father had been an elevator operator.) Now, Manny oversaw six floors and 400 employees. He was dressed in a suit and tie, which he accented—for our visit to production areas—with a white gauzy shower cap that sat on his head like a collapsed soufflé.
    The secret to virtually all nonchocolate candy, Manny explained, was time and temperature. The longer and higher you cooked the basic ingredients—sugar, corn syrup, starch—the harder the candy became. On the fifth floor, where Necco made taffy, they were heating the staples to 243 degrees in gigantic kettles. The taffy was then poured onto cooling wheels the size of steamrollers, which squeezed the stuff into sheets that looked like stained glass. The taffy, still a blazing 180 degrees, was cut into 67-pound batches and heaved onto cooling tables, then lugged onto mechanical pulling hooks.
    The taffy, yanked to and fro by two rotating arms, gradually softened and turned opaque. At this point, the glob—looking very much like an albino python—got hoisted onto the batch roller, a pair of knobbed rotating wheels which massaged the taffy into a thin rope. The next machine chopped the rope into bite-size pieces, wrapped them in waxed paper, and sent them whizzing down a conveyor belt for packing. Manny plucked a piece off the belt and handed it to me. It was still warm.
    Down on the third floor, wafer production was in full swing and I immediately experienced that overwhelming olfactory blast known as Halloween Smell; a free-floating bouquet of sugar, cocoa butter, and flavorings. The wafers required no boiling. Instead, the ingredients were pulverized in giant mixers, producing a grainy paste that looked sort of like caviar, if you can envision caviar in the neon register. The paste was rolled into thin sheets and punched into the desired shape. This punching happened very quickly. (So quickly that it occurred to me—in one of those moments of morbid speculation that besets me when I’m overstimulated—that I could have slipped my hand under one of the mechanized pistons and wound up with Necco stigmata.) At peak efficiency, a single assembly line can kick out 38,000 pounds of candy per day, or 15,390,000 wafers. I am not going to tell you that this is enough wafers to stretch from the earth to the moon six times. I will say, only, that it is a lot of fucking wafers .
    Manny, who displayed an endearing (if not entirely hygienic) habit of sampling the raw paste for quality with his thumb, was a lifelong fan. “We used to go to the movie theater