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

and fling them at the screen. Actually, we only threw the ones we didn’t like. I didn’t like the purple ones, so I threw those.” Anyone familiar with the Necco flavor pantheon will commend Manny on his good taste in this matter. I myself had often pondered just what flavor purple was supposed to signify. Frankincense? Turpentine? The correct answer, as Manny noted with some dismay, was clove . Why anyone would wish to produce a cloveflavored candy remained obscure. (Paging MWM.)
    The Necco packing process had changed very little over the years. Tubs of wafers were fed into a giant hopper and poured down a pipe from the third floor to the second, where they funneled into rows. A crew of women then pinched up a length of wafers between their two index fingers and dropped them in racks. Picture having to fill roll after roll of quarters in a faint cloud of sugared starch, and you get the idea. The racks were pushed along to a final inspector, who surveyed each package to make sure all eight colors were represented among the 38 to 40 wafers per pack. If not, she plucked out repeats and inserted missing colors. All this happened in approximately four seconds. The floor beneath this operation was a vast and dazzling fresco of broken wafers.
    The big buzz around Necco was the company’s newest acquisition, the Clark Bar. With good reason. It is possible to say that you have not lived a fully actualized life unless you have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I am qualified to make this judgment because I have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I have eaten two.
    A native of Pittsburgh, the Clark was first produced in 1917 and became one of the most popular bars of the post–World War II candy boom. It consists of a crunchy peanut filling covered in a milk chocolate coating. Most people would compare it to the Butterfinger, though it has far more peanut flavor than a Butterfinger and a softer bite. Necco itself used to produce a chocolatecovered peanut crunch known as the Bolster Bar. But everyone seemed to agree the Clark Bar was tastier. This, according to Manny, is because of the Clark’s unique production process.
Step 1: The staples were boiled into a sticky glop, cooled, and pulled to a beige, taffylike consistency.
Step 2: The filling was fed into a huge machine which flattened it and spread a layer of real peanut butter on top. A single worker, hovering over the machine with a spatula, rolled this slab into a sort of giant burrito. This step was the linchpin of the entire Clark gestalt. It ensured that the filling was striated into sediments of peanut butter and crunch. (Manny later demonstrated this to me by biting a snack-size bar lengthwise and showing me the sediments.)
Step 3: The burrito was lowered into a batch roller, where it was funneled down and came snaking out, tickertape style, to be cut into segments.
Step 4: The peanut crunch was now ready to be covered in chocolate, a process known as enrobing. Enrobing is the money shot of candy production, a sight so sensual as to seem pornographic. The conveyor belt carried the naked Clarks forward, into a curtain of chocolate, which, in spilling down, created the delicate ripples and wavelets you find atop most candy bars. It is this illusion of liquidity that I have always found so seductive; when we look at the top of a candy bar, what we see is a particular moment, the dynamism of the fluid state captured.
Step 5: The wet bars were carried into a cooling tunnel. A half hour later they emerged, 100 yards down the line, ready for packing. The entire genesis of the Clark, from raw ingredients to wrapper, took 90 minutes.
    The fresh bar had a more supple consistency than storebought. The peanut butter was more redolent. The chocolate coating melted the moment it hit your tongue. “Fresh off the line is a different thing,” Manny said. “It’s like from someone’s kitchen. I eat them all day long. That’s why I’m as big as I