Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (18 page)

And so, after I’d finished ogling all the various munchies (and not, despite severe kleptomaniacal pangs, stealing any of them) he led me back to his office and set the box on a thick layer of invoices and order forms.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

I assured him the box was gorgeous. And it was. There was a photograph of the Idaho Candy Company taken in the thirties, showing a line of black cars and men in waistcoats posing out front. This was set against a matte background with gold trim. Beside the photograph was a brief history of the toffee recorded in elegant script.

He asked me a few pointed questions, about color and composition. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t patronizing him. Finally, he seemed satisfied and set the box down between us.

The more I talked with Dave, the more I was struck by his similarity to Marty Palmer. Both men had forsaken a highpowered career and returned home to take over a family business. Both were former athletes (Dave had been a state-ranked tennis player) who had settled into family life and become civic leaders. When I mentioned this to Dave, he shook his head. “I’m not as hard a pusher as Marty,” he said.

This is what I probably liked most about Dave Wagers, in the end. He retained a necessary fascination with the teleology of capitalism, which is to maximize profit. But he could also see that there was a spiritual price to be paid for all that striving. Roiling within him was a messier, less-profitable impulse—the wish to create.

11

THE PAST IS JUST AHEAD

I spent my entire youth eating the candy bars produced by the Annabelle Candy Company. I didn’t know this at the time. I wasn’t, as they say, an
informed consumer
. But the record stands: Hadn’t the cop who nearly cuffed me for arson found on my person a half-eaten Big Hunk? Hadn’t my older brother Dave once promised to give me an Abba-Zaba if I agreed to search the graveyard next to Terman Junior High for his Estes rocket? (And hadn’t he subsequently reneged, claiming that an oral agreement did not constitute, as such, a binding contract?) Hadn’t my father, the estimable Richard, once thrown a frozen Rocky Road across the room during a moment of paternal frustration. Or was that a U-no bar?

No matter. My point is that Annabelle candy bars were a touchstone of my youth. I knew the names and wrappers and tastes and textures by heart. Then, as happens in the modern candy game, they disappeared entirely from my life, once I left California. I spent a good many hours trying to explain the Big Hunk to friends from the East Coast.

Vanilla taffy? Vanilla taffy and peanuts? Sounds gross
.

No, no. It’s delicious. Really
.

The problem was that I hadn’t actually eaten a Big Hunk since I was fourteen.

So it was with a certain Homeric sense of closure that I strolled into Annabelle headquarters, located on the aptly named Industrial Boulevard in the gritty East Bay burg of Hayward. I was met, almost immediately, by Susan Karl, the president of Annabelle. A short, dark-haired woman in a blue blazer and slacks, she looked, if I may be candid, very much like my own mother (though, for the record, my mother has never worn red, square-framed glasses). The physical similarity was no doubt accentuated by Karl’s demeanor, which I would describe as both highly competent and pleasantly neurotic.

“Okay,” she said, ushering me into her office, “so you’re working on something. What? A book? I’d like a copy of what -ever you’re going to write. And I’d prefer if you don’t make me sound like an idiot.” It was clear to me—and would become only more so—that making Susan Karl sound like an idiot would take some doing.

The company, she noted, was founded by her grandfather, Sam Altshuler, who immigrated from Russia in 1917, settled in San Francisco, and started making the Rocky Road in his kitchen. He sold the confection from a pushcart on Market Street. The business, which he named after his only child, failed several times. This did little to deter Altshuler. Above Karl’s desk was a photo of the groundbreaking of the Hayward factory, taken in 1965. “The little girl is me,” she said. “I was sick from school that day, so I got to come. Isn’t that cool?”

Karl’s memories of her grandfather were vivid. “He doted on me. I could do no wrong in his eyes. He lived with us for quite a while and what I remember is that he always smelled like chocolate and there was marshmallow all over his shoes every day. My friends thought that was so cool, but to me it was just, like, normal.”

When Altshuler passed away, in 1971, his daughter, Annabelle, took over. Karl’s brother took the helm some years later. Karl herself had little to do with the business. She moved to Los Angeles with her husband and became a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office. After a decade, she was appointed as a judge in Malibu. “With the robe and the whole thing,” she said. “I job-shared with a partner. We both had little kids, so part-time was perfect. I did civil and criminal, and I did have to put people in the slammer. Here’s my best story. Do you want to hear my best story? You know Jim Belushi? Well, he had a speeding ticket and he went to trial before me. He was adorable. So funny! It was all I could do to keep from losing it during the trial. I had to sit there like this.” Karl stared down at her desk with an expression of grim determination.

Five years ago, she and her husband decided to move back to the Bay Area. They were tired of L.A. No one read there. So Karl decided to take over the family business, a decision that made her brother and mother ecstatic. “We’re profitable most years,” Karl told me. “We have a very loyal following. If you grew up in this part of the country, you’ve heard of us. The only people who’ve never heard of us are on the East Coast. But even there we’re making some headway. Take a look at this!”

She directed my attention to a copy of the
New York Times Magazine
. One of the articles was about Dylan Lauren’s hip new Manhattan candy shop. The accompanying photo featured a selection of offbeat candy products and there, smack in the middle, were the Big Hunk and Look!

In fact, Annabelle products—on the basis of sheer quirkiness—made frequent appearances in the zeitgeist. A memorable episode of
Seinfeld
showed George Costanza at his desk. He opened the top drawer and there, pictured for a long moment, was a Big Hunk. (The irony, not lost on Karl, is that Big Hunk was not, at that time, even sold in New York, where the show was set.) Abba-Zabas played a major role in the film
Half Baked
, a Dave Chappelle vehicle that had become a minor cult classic amongst pothead teenagers. Karl still got people approaching her booth at trade shows, catching sight of the Abba-Zabas, and saying, “Hey,
Half Baked!
” This was just fine with her. She considered it free advertising.

Karl led me into the factory and up a set of stairs that allowed us a vista of the entire operation. It was a behemoth, 60,000 square feet in all, a jumble of catwalks and platforms and kettles and pipes and pumps, with dozens of workers in hard hats zipping to and fro across the wet concrete floor. From a distance it looked like industrial chaos, the sort of place Charlie Chaplin would have had a field day with.

Karl moved briskly through the machinery, bent slightly forward at the waist, like a general inspecting her troops. She was wearing a jaunty yellow hard hat. “Okay, first thing, you can’t take any pictures of the area where we make Rocky Roads because the process is proprietary. Okay? My mother made me promise that I wouldn’t let anyone take pictures so, I’m sorry, I have to abide by her word. She’s still the boss, because she still owns a majority of the company, and besides, she’s my mother.”

“Okay,” I said.

This caveat might lead one to expect that the production of the Rocky Road was ultramodern. It was not. In fact, the process was little changed from the days of Grandpa Altshuler. One whole corner of the factory was devoted to a quartet of metal tables about 70 feet long and 4 feet across. It was here that the marshmallow was laid out to cool over -night, given an initial layer of chocolate and crushed cashews, and cut into manageable squares. Further down the line, a worker was peeling the wax paper off the squares (they had the appearance of chocolate floor tiles) and feeding them into a device that cut them into strips. A device nicknamed the “octopus” separated each of the strips and fed them onto their own miniconveyor belt. Further down the line they would be cut into bar-size pieces and enrobed again, then cooled and wrapped.

The production of the Big Hunk began with peanuts, which were fried in oil, then hustled along a conveyor belt. “This woman is our inspector,” Karl noted. “She does nothing but throw out any peanuts that don’t look right. Like a peanut that’s black or something. We get very few complaints.”

In the center of the factory was a cooking area composed of no fewer than thirteen kettles. It now became clear to me why I’d been required to wear a hard hat—because some of these kettles were being raised into the air.

“This is where we actually cook our Big Hunk,” Karl said.

“Smells like marshmallow,” I said.

“No,” she said brusquely. “The Big Hunk has nothing to do with marshmallow.” The very notion seemed to cause her physical discomfort. “It’s a vanilla nougat with—”

“I thought it was taffy,” I said.

“
Nougat
,” Karl said. “A vanilla
nougat
with peanuts.”

“Isn’t nougat supposed to be sort of fluffy?” I said.

Karl stared at me. “Well, alright, I guess it’s a chewy nougat.” She pointed to a huge kettle, which was being hoisted pretty much
over my head
and toward an even huger steel hopper. A worker in a brown apron stood on a raised platform. A sort of ballet ensued, in which the worker grabbed the kettle and angled its contents—a sticky white syrup now pebbled with peanuts—into the hopper. The liquid nougat then squirted through a spigot at the bottom of the hopper into a six-footlong bread pan.

“What we do,” Karl said, hurrying past the platform, “is we put the pans into these ovens here and cook the nougat. Then, once they’ve gotten to the right consistency, we take out the pans and what we’ve got is a loaf. The nougat is pretty hard to get out, so these guys have to slam the pans. You can hear it all over the building.”

The loaves were then fed, two at a time, into a truly fearsome cutting machine called a Phizer, which sliced each loaf into slender bars. This process accounted for the unique look of the Big Hunk, which featured a cross section of browned peanuts floating in the white
nougat
. Karl picked up one of the bars from the assembly line. It drooped onto her fist. “The Big Hunk is the best when it’s warm and soft like this,” she said. “What we recommend is for people to pop them into the microwave for a few seconds. It’s right on the back of the package.”

REMEMBER THIS NAME: BANANA-ZABA

To see how the U-no bars were made, we took a trip to a place called the chocolate platform, a small, raised area that (as one might expect) was liberally decorated with chocolate. Indeed, it looked liked the scene of a particularly grisly chocolate homicide. The stuff was everywhere: dripping from the pipes, spattered on buckets and boxes, congealed into dark reddish pools on the floor. “Oh, this is terrible!” Karl said. “What a mess. This is the reason we don’t usually show this area to anybody. You should know we’re getting new machinery.”

The filling for the U-no bars was basically milk chocolate whipped full of air and finely ground almonds. Karl showed me the machine that did this whipping; it was equipped with 20 blades, none of which I could actually see because they were moving way too fast. The resulting substance, which I am reluctant to categorize as either liquid or solid, was then piped downstairs to a machine called an extruder. I had heard a fair amount about the extruder in my candy travels and had envisioned something like a giant pastry funnel squeezed by means of a hydraulic pump or, perhaps, costumed dwarfs. The Annabelle extruder was a bit of a letdown, in that:

1. It was a large metal box; and

2. The exact mechanism of extrusion was concealed within this large metal box.

All I could see (and this only by squatting down and craning my neck) was the pale brown filling emerging from
somewhere
in the form of slender bars. Despite the pleasant aroma, the visual image was somewhat disconcerting, and I did not linger.

The bars were cooled, enrobed in a darker chocolate, then cooled again. I spent a minute or so hinting to Karl that I really wanted to try a U-no bar fresh off the line. She assured me that she would grab me some samples later. “They’re really good frozen,” she said. “They taste like mousse.” But I was intrigued by the prospect of the ground almonds and intoxicated by the smell of the enrober and so I waited until Karl had turned to speak to her factory manager, Carlos, then grabbed a U-no bar that was lying on a rejects cart. I had about 30 seconds to eat the bar and did so, in three bites. (As a result of this decision I spent the rest of the day revisiting the U-no bar, in the form of flavored burps, a not-altogether-unpleasant arrangement.)

My feelings about the U-no were conflicted. On the one hand, I could see what Karl was talking about with her mousse comment. The bar did have pillowy texture. The ground almonds, while not really detectable on the tongue, lent the chocolate a rich, nutty undertone. The problem resided with what I’ll call the fat quotient. Mousse, after all, tastes good because it’s full of cocoa butter, and the mouth recognizes this at once. The U-no, by contrast, contained a good deal of air, and the result was an ineradicable sense of partial vacancy, of subterfuge—like eating a rice cake. I did not mention this to Karl, of course. I merely gulped down the bar and hoped that the line workers who had witnessed my act of thievery wouldn’t rat me out.

I was most interested in seeing the Abba-Zaba being made. For those who have never had the good fortune of tasting an Abba-Zaba, it is easily distinguished as the only candy bar (that I know of) which contains peanut butter
inside
taffy. Indeed, the great joy of eating an Abba-Zaba resides in the peculiar oral aspects of combining these two candy genres, generally thought to be disparate. The American palette is accustomed, by this time, to chocolate and peanut butter. We think nothing of the combination, in part because both substances melt at about the same temperature. That is, they make the fateful transformation from solid to liquid contemporaneously. Not so with the Abba-Zaba. Taffy may soften, after all, but it remains resilient, essentially solid, in the gnashed heat of the mouth. The peanut butter, by contrast, yields almost immediately and begins a delicious process of seepage, so that you are left, in effect, with an organically rendered peanut butter taffy. (The same process abides with the Charleston Chew: the warmth of the tongue, along with the motion of the teeth, softens the taffy and infuses it with the melted chocolate coating.)

The Abba-Zaba was not in production, but Karl agreed to walk me through the process. She began by leading me into the “heat room,” a darkened sarcophagus where they stored the taffy and peanut butter in white plastic bins. You could only see the dim outlines of these bins, and their contents gave off a ghostly shimmer, like something out of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. The Abba-Zaba production line itself was humble. “Here’s how it works,” Karl said. “We cook up a huge batch of taffy, which looks sort of funny when it first comes out of the kettle, like Elmer’s glue or something. So then we pull it on this mechanical horse and it gets less sticky and turns opaque. Then feed it into this batch roller, which flattens it out into a thin sheet. Then—”